sensory borrowing x volatile parts. residence/publication

text by Jess Bernhart, about show at the Volatile Parts Oct/Nov 2019 residency:

arianna khmelniuk, the olfactory artist behind zapah lab, asks how we talk and think about smell. how do memories and smell interact, enhance, and overwrite each other? how does language fail us, and why, when we try to describe the evening air? what is inherited, learned? what cannot be taught?

khmelniuk has conducted olfactory artistic research for several years, with a sensitivity that is both poetic and rigorously analytic. at volatile parts, she is externalizing that research, presenting ekphrastic takes on smell, which, cumulatively, emphasizes the futility of trying to describe it. the challenge of adequately documenting scents invites comparing them to movement
to years
to nouns
to shapes
to flavors
to textures
to people
to colors
to the place where they are felt in the body
and so, describing scent is surrounded by feelings of enormity and insufficiency, a bit like trying to hand-write the news every day in its entirety.