Sticky Meanings: Scent, power and the work of Elaine Cameron-Weir

I vividly remember the first time I smelled the work of Elaine Cameron-Weir. The scent of frankincense and labdanum met me like a relative I don’t remember, familiar and foreign, and I felt plunged into the enormity of human history. After the scent washed through me, I was confronted with assemblages of metal, chain, and leather. These industrial structures are sometimes bodily and include items clearly borrowed from military contexts, medical laboratories, or a welding shop. Many of the visual elements are at least partly recognizable, but the scent made me uncomfortably aware of traces of knowledge long forgotten. 

Did I know what frankincense smelled like before I saw this work? It’s hard to say. I didn’t grow up religious, and any contact I had with religion was not in any smoky or heavily incensed setting. Immersed in Cameron-Weir’s installation, though, I knew these smells. Scent is intimately tied to memory. Scent molecules plug directly into the region of your brain associated with emotion and memory. These scents, both familiar but without any discernible seed of a scent memory, disoriented me like a neon arrow pointing to a misty void. But the significance of these scents has been established for several thousands of years. Systems of power leave psychological debris in their wake, and this familiar-unfamiliarness that I experienced likely speaks more to the tendrils of Christianity’s influence than to my individual subjective experience. 

Power is sticky. Its signifiers are hard to slough off. Elaine Cameron-Weir’s materials retain much of their “out of gallery” connotations. Cameron-Weir is based in New York, but her work retains visual traces of the military,oil, and gas industries that she would have been exposed to during her upbringing near Red Deer, Alberta. She deftly alters her found objects, but the material is never obscured to the point where military items, medical devices, and the like are no longer recognizable as such. The works remain imbued with the power structures responsible for their origination. Elaine Cameron-Weir’s material transformations reference, eschew, and play with these sticky meanings to reveal the invisible traces of power that dance around every aspect of our lives.

When one recognizes the high-altitude flight mask in Who are what looks out from behind you are is the thing that names what transforms…now, look what calms the captive by letting him sniff the perfume, like smell what smells like your masters crotch (2017), it immediately directs a viewer towards meaning-making by association. While the scents have more immediate emotional histories, they have less overt material connotations. Labdanum is secreted from a hardy shrub that thrives in very dry locations throughout the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East. Droplets of the sticky resin cling to animals who graze on the plants. Historically, these traces were painstakingly combed and picked from the coats and beards of goats and sheep. It has a rich, warm scent that is earthy, sweet, honey-like and can be leathery and a bit animalic. Frankincense is also a resin harvested from trees in the Horn of Africa and across the Arabian Peninsula. Tears of this woody-scented resin shed from anywhere the bark of the tree is damaged. Both have been used for ceremonial and medicinal purposes for millennia and have been traded through historic spice trade routes and contemporary religious and wellness industry supply chains. 

Historic spice and incense routes that allowed for the international use of labdanum and frankincense show how structures of commerce, military, and technology must intertwine to make such globally scaled systems possible. The contemporary use of these materials likewise illustrates a contemporary religious industrial complex as well as the multi-billion-dollar wellness industry. Frankincense, in particular, is becoming increasingly popular because of its supposed health benefits, ranging from aiding the immune system to fighting cancer. Within contemporary North American culture, frankincense also points to where alternative medicine and religious extremism blend, and the far-right and the far-left meld to question certain types of science and medicine. 

The industrial physicality of Cameron-Weir’s work can easily be juxtaposed with the ephemerality of the scents, the traces of which snake around her work and through exhibition spaces. But a juxtaposition also resides in and of the scents themselves. Like scent, power is both constructed and immaterial, yet also physical and very real. Resins are only lightly scented in their cool, solid form. In Cameron-Weir’s artworks, they are melted over open flame or with heating mechanisms drawn from scientific laboratory settings. Once heated, the resin melts before releasing the full strength of its odour as it evaporates. There is a material melding of science and religion in this release. The simple transmutation of state from solid to liquid to gas is the most basic building block of scientific experiment and religious experience. This alchemical process merges magic and superstition with science and empirical evidence. 

Like microscopic science experiments that can replicate the broader functioning of the universe, the use of scent in a work like Who are what looks out from behind you are is the thing that names what transforms…now, look what calms the captive by letting him sniff the perfume, like smell what smells like your masters crotch can reveal broader systems. In this work, a leather eye mask appears to drape weightlessly atop a metal rod. A high-altitude flight mask designed to fit over the mouth is hooked below. Labdanum resin is nestled inside an unzipped laboratory heating mantle that opens like a clamshell, offered up as though from an upright palm. The entire work is built atop a stainless-steel drum.

Are we the calmed captives referenced in this work? Systems of power can offer a hand or close it, cover your mouth or protect you, open your eyes or make you need to take cover. Scent has similar wide-ranging abilities: it can soothe and excite; so, like power, it can also manipulate. Many of our public spaces are perfumed. In addition to religious spaces, casinos, retail spaces, show homes, offices and other spaces are purposefully scented to elicit desired emotional responses. Does a bright lemon scent ease you into wagering your mortgage payment? Do ritual smells make you more likely to believe biblical stories and accept the power of the church? Does frankincense smell more soothing and trustworthy than a hospital? 

The scent of Cameron-Weir’s work does not ask permission; it is active and points itself out to you. It goes where the airflow and the HVAC take it and can impose itself on you in a one-sided interaction. It washes over unrelated artworks, and it will also cling to clothes, skin, and hair. Because it’s so closely tied to memory, Cameron-Weir’s work also gets to plant itself in your brain where it can live with all your other remembrances of these scents. Who are what looks out from behind you are is the thing that names what transforms…now, look what calms the captive by letting him sniff the perfume, like smell what smells like your masters crotch could bubble up next time you are sitting in church or standing in the supplement section of the health foods store. 

In A day dream about the authority of a heavy desk, about other vocations spent behind one ordering certain men around, about domineering and maybe reclining slowly, exhaling (2014), Cameron-Weir has melded visual and olfactory hints of power found in corporate culture, religion and science. Three thick slabs of smooth terrazzo form the minimal yet recognizable outline of a desk or table. Two metal rods rise from either end. Medical clamps support two neon tubes, electrical cords, open flames, and delicate trays of frankincense. By incorporating frankincense, she prompts viewers to think about the layers of emotional, psychological, and learnt controls. In religion, for example, the scents of ritual confuse knowledge, memory, and emotion. The work makes one think about the entangled layers of bureaucracy and emotional power our systems hold over us. Religion, afterall, is not merely a feeling of faith; it also involves legally binding and governmentally recognized agreements and administration. 

Cameron-Weir writes extensively about her sculptures in private writing. Her writing functions like preparatory sketches for the work. This prose is dream-like. It does not provide clarity but builds nuance and complexity. She takes her titles directly from this poetic writing. The titles give hints and cues but do not prescribe. Although the imposing terrazzo desk in A day dream about the authority of a heavy desk, about other vocations spent behind one ordering certain men around, about domineering and maybe reclining slowly, exhaling is a signifier of domineering power, the title draws attention to the “other vocations spent behind one ordering certain men around,” the multitude of layers that support power transcending the individuals themselves in power. The last word of the title—exhaling—is of particular interest. It doesn’t convey a chilling breath down the back of your neck but the sweet-smelling breath of the artwork. The enticing allure of power, its glossy newness, its ancientness, its “it’s always been like this”-ness. Exhaling is also the opposite of smelling and helps to complicate notions of power and scent. The power of scent itself can easily be undermined with a simple exhale. If scent has its own system of power and the exhale is antithetical to smelling, the exhale points to both resistance and futility. On the one hand, there is resistance in simply exhaling so as not to smell. But how sustainable is this action? Through burning lungs and a light head, scent will outlast.

---

Lindsey Sharman is a curator and writer based on Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton and has been the Curator of the Art Gallery of Alberta since 2018. She is interested in sensorial art experiences and the aesthetics of olfaction.

Elaine Cameron-Weir is a Canadian artist based in New York. Her work is informed by the array of systems and
structures that humans have created to deal with the unknown – be that through scientific inquiry, religion, modes of governance or creative practices. Her sculptures incorporate objects repurposed from their scientific, medical, military or faith-giving functions into reliquaries or representations of larger systems of belief and power.

This article is published in issue 42.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue