Elodie Pong: Paradise Paradoxe

The invisible architecture of scent is the starting point of Swiss-based, Boston-born video and installation artist Elodie Pongs (b. 1966) latest project, Paradise Paradoxe. Immersing her audience in images, smells and color-saturated light, Pong probes the interface between fiction and reality for her exhibition at Helmhaus, Zu?rich. Her accompanying artist book is dense and euphoric with dreamy, over saturated color images of her installations and includes 12 essays touching on ideas within olfactory art including the relationship between odor and music, how we perceive odors, and odor as a tool of social and historical analysis, among other concepts. The book is a comfortably designed soft-cover publication with the texts flanked by two sections of full-bleed color photographs overlaid here and there with the names of perfumes: Omnia, Pure, Rouge, Rien. A university-trained sociologist and anthropologist, Pong deals with social structures in her artistic work, including intimacy and separation, and unstable communications in a pluralistic and individualized society.