Review by Rachel Crowther – An unnerving composition that attacks your mind… and your nose! | Art and design

TChisenhall Gallery smells strangely sweet. Somewhere between butter and parma violet, but sharper, and intensely chemical. It is an olfactory assault, half soothing and familiar, half violent and unnatural.

This is the strange and unsettling middle ground that young London-based artist Rachel Crowther likes to inhabit. Just look at what she’s done here in her first institutional exhibition, where baby pink cuteness collides with a terrifying, hard-edged military aesthetic.

The gallery is painted in soft pastels, but in the center of the space is a massive army mobile sanitary unit, made in the US but used by British forces. You walk into it as if you are on your way to be evaluated by some tired paramedic in uniform, as if your body is about to be treated by the state. The smell changes here, as the buttery candy smell is replaced by the unpleasant smell of rubber. There are signs of the sanitary unit’s former purpose everywhere—chemical warnings, triage questionnaires, evacuation plans, resuscitation charts—but they are merely hints. Like Mike Nelson’s craziest installation, there’s no full narrative, just an empty office that once housed military personnel in dangerous quarters.

Crowther purchased the mobile health unit at a military auction. It came full of discarded papers, and one document — an A4-sized piece of paper stuck to the wall — shows it was used as part of decontamination efforts after the failed 2018 assassination attempt on double agent Sergei Skripal with the Novichok nerve agent. Suddenly I thought, is this smell really rubbery or is it something more sinister?

The tension in Crowther’s installation is immediately apparent: this structure was built to sustain life, but in the name of war and conflict. It is designed to help you, to take care of you, but you are merely a tool of the state, ammunition to be spent.

The paint on the gallery’s walls and ceilings is Baker Miller pink, also called dark pink, an experimental color used in American prison cells to calm angry criminals. Then there’s that nice stench. If it smells familiar it’s because Crowther created it from materials associated with powdered milk production – life-saving, industrially produced synthetic foods. There’s another scent molecule here too, hexa, a natural compound found in human skin. One study revealed that it reduces aggression in men, but raises it in women. It is emitted in large quantities from the heads of newborn babies. Chemical manipulator.

This entire show is Crowther’s reimagining of color and smell as a psychological process, exploring how these fundamental aspects of human life – light and smell – can be manufactured, militarized, and used against us.

She asks: What is health when it is under state control? Who does being fit and strong serve? Who benefits when you are taken care of by industry, the military, government or corporations?

You walk in the space torn between ideas of care and exploitation. Are you being cared for and comforted, or are you being manipulated and used?

It’s all very panicky and intensely smelly. Military industrial whimsy reeks of milk, like the strangest depths of a terrible conspiratorial Reddit thread that has come true. Conceptual pin-up art that stings your nose, messes with your head… and makes you incredibly suspicious of your GP.