Please join us for Friday's Colloquium in Conceptual Studies event to be held in conjunction with Milwaukee's gallery night and the Peck School of the Arts Kenilworth Square East open house. The event will consist of an installation by odor artist Sissel Tolaas, entitled Fear 9 in KSE 463 (also on display on Saturday, April 19th), and a conversation between Tolaas and MIT-based art scholar Caroline Jones at 6 PM in KSE 412.Sissel Tolaas (b. Norway, 1961) is a Berlin-based artist who has been working, researching and experimenting intensively with the topic of smell since 1990. She has developed revolutionary projects with smells and fragrances based upon her own knowledge of chemical science, mathematics, linguistics and languages, and visual art. Her installations have exhibited all over the world, and she has consulted with companies and institutions such as Cartier, Louis Vuitton, COMME des GARCONS, Estee Lauder, Chrysler Future, The Boston Consulting Group, ZH/Berlin, Bayers-Schering Inc., and the San Francisco Neurosciences Institute. In January of 2004, she established the research lab, IFF re_searchLab Berlin, on smell & communication, which is supported by IFF (International Flavors & Fragrances) Inc., New York. The Lab conducts research on the topic of smell/olfactory and smell-communication for the purpose of trying to change the existing approach to "our noses and smells and the process of smelling."
Caroline A. Jones studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception. Professor of art history and director of the History, Theory, Criticism Program in the Department of Architecture at MIT, she has also worked as an essayist and curator, most recently with MIT’s List Visual Art Center on Video Trajectories. She held positions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1977-83) and the Harvard University Art Museums (1983-85) prior to completing her PhD at Stanford University in 1992. Her exhibitions and/or films have been shown at MoMA and Harvard as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, and the Hara Museum Tokyo, among other venues; her publications include Sensorium (as editor, 2006), Eyesight Alone (2005), Machine in the Studio (1996/98), and the co-edited volume Picturing Science, Producing Art (1998). A frequent contributor to Artforum, Jones’s current research into globalism informs her next book on contemporary art, the world picture, and what she calls “biennial culture.”
