You must smell the Odor Organ at the New Bedford Art Museum. Here's what else is happening

NEW BEDFORD -- The New Bedford Art Museum is featuring a must-try odor organ for your nostrils to experience as part of its "Gateways to Awareness" exhibition running through Dec. 31.

"We strive to offer dynamic and visitor-focused exhibitions with opportunities to experience art in a new way," said Suzanne de Vegh, executive director of the museum.

While visiting "Gateways to Awareness" much of the exhibit is interactive. The Odor Organ uses familiar scents such as apple pie or grass by creating an accord of fragrance notes, an artwork by M Dougherty. The revolutionary piece allows visitors to "play" a fragrance like a piece of music.

Numbered diagrams akin to musical scores on the walls surrounding the organ provide instructions to compose a variety of fragrances. "But you can go rogue and make an original scent of your choice," de Vegh added.

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The entire exhibit explores the role of memory, perception and the five senses. The artworks included in the exhibition engage the viewer in multi-sensory experiences across a variety of genres and media including disability, floral, olfactory and sound art(s).

From flowering mazes to a honeycomb guitar

"When we think of floral compositions often the first thing that comes to mind is a beautiful flower arrangement that's meant to be decorative. Floral art, also called botanical art is so much more than that."

Today artists are expanding the understanding of the expressive and conceptual possibilities of floral materials.    Like any other media utilized well, floral materials can be deployed as a legitimate artistic means for telling stories, asking questions, making statements, whatever the artist desires, de Vegh explained.

In Bella Meyer's installation "Memories" floral materials such a grasses, moss, birch trees and reeds form a living landscape within the Art Museum. The scene or tableau Meyer presents is based on an extraordinary event in the her life, a visceral feeling of belonging upon seeing a birch tree forest in what was then called Leningrad, a deep connection to her Russian ancestry via nature.

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Rachel Rosenkrantz's "309hz" is an ode to profound connections within nature creating a musical instrument in harmony with nature through the use of biomaterials and biomimicry has been an integral part of her artistic practice."As a luthier and beekeeper, I discerned the blueprints underlying the bees' combs and their behavior. This understanding allowed me to design a specific hive and guitar structure that gently guided my bees to create combs where I needed them for the instrument resonance at 309Hz (worker bees' frequency), thus becoming co-creators in a harmonious partnership between nature and artistry," she said.

Ending the year with a menu of experimental forms

Lindsey Dunnagan's works on paper and immersive fabric environment, "Land Enveloped" upend guest's expectations about space and spatial relationships. Visitors walk through a maze-like series of hanging fabric panels inspired by tunnels the artist dug beneath deep ice-capped snow as a child in Alaska.

Her colorful landscapes portray in her words "mountains acting like clouds" and put shadows in front of objects, not behind them.

Composer and performer Molly Joyce provides a window into a variety of lived experiences in "Perspective," a video project featuring disabled interviewees responding to what the words access, care, interdependence and more means to them.

Derek Hoffend's "Portal" and "Sonotron" exhibits revolve around his fascination of sound, theories of vibration and resonance, as well as the way sensory stimuli can affect the physical body, nervous system and mental states, ideally for positive and therapeutic effects.

"My work strives to create immersive, multi-sensory interactive experiences that are both engaging and calming for viewers," he said.

The goal of "Portal" is to create a sound and light environment that enables a positive mood-altering experience. The glowing shapes fade from purple to blue colors along with slowly pulsing tones that surround the viewer and are intended to facilitate feelings of calmness.

The piece "Sonotron" is a sculpture that includes sound and colored light, and is designed to be an immersive but peaceful experience that engages multiple senses. The piece has multiple speakers that surround the viewer with moving tones, and a bed that viewers can sit or lay on which has special speakers in it that allow low frequency vibrations to be felt in the body.

According to Hoffend, the goal of the piece is to create a unique sensory experience that has a therapeutic effect through the hearing and feeling sound vibrations.

"This year-end show is a veritable tasting menu of the experimental and experiential forms of art the Museum is scheduled to present over the next two years," de Vegh said.

Standard-Times staff writer Seth Chitwood can be reached at schitwood@s-t.com. Follow him on twitter:@ChitwoodReports. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Standard-Times today.

This article originally appeared on Standard-Times: New Bedford Art Museum presents 'Gateways to Awareness' exhibit