Accident
with Austin Young, Brent Leonesio
2013
The Institute for Art and Olfaction teamed up with artist and provocateur Austin Young for a very transformative collaboration, unleashing the olfactory prowess of Los Angeles based perfumer Brent Leonesio to create a new edition of perfume: ‘Accident’.
The project was in support of Austin Young’s crowd-sourced participatory art experience and musical: ‘TBD’. ‘Accident’ premiered at the ‘TBD’ Slumber Party and Final Workshop on Friday August 9, 2013.
ABOUT ‘ACCIDENT’
The IAO invited perfumer Brent Leonesio to collaborate with Austin Young on a limited art edition. In keeping with their respective practices, Young and Leonesio set out to use the tropes of perfumery as a tool for subversion. In their hands (and with the help of graphic designer Micah Hahn) scent, package design and marketing campaigns become tools with which to reexamine the concepts of beauty, glamour, luxury and mass appeal.
The bottles were hand-transformed by Young. For his part, Leonesio set out to find olfactory beauty in unexpected places (including notes such as gasoline vapor, safety glass, smoking tires, face powder and a mechanic). The hand-transformed bottles come in a numbered box. They intended as an art piece, and were created in an edition of 100.
Austin Young teamed up with entertainer par excellence Deven Green to shoot a unique spoof of glamorous perfume commercials. The result is as odd and irreverent as the two collaborators, themselves.
+ Learn about the perfume here
Video by Austin Young
Starring Deven Green
Music by The Heathers
Hair and makeup by David Marvel
Graphic Design by Micah Hahn
+ Watch the video at this link.
AWARDS FOR ACCIDENT
‘Best Perfume Images of the Year’ for 2013 by EauMG.
‘Best Collaboration’ for 2013 by CaFleureBon.
PROJECT CREDITS
Concept: Austin Young
Production: Austin Young, Brent Leonesio, Saskia Wilson-Brown (for The Institute for Art and Olfaction)
Perfume: Brent Leonesio
Model Photography: Austin Young
Bottle Photography: Saskia Wilson-Brown for The Institute for Art and Olfaction
Bottle Design: Austin Young and Saskia Wilson-Brown, with Brent Leonesio
Logo & Graphic Design: Micah Hahn at AutumnSeventy
Models: Squeaky Blonde, The Infamous Boom Boom, Tammie Brown
Special Thanks: Micah Hahn, Lenora Claire, O. Berk Bottles, and the marvelous Addie.
This project was based on & inspired by the visual artwork of artist Austin Young, and the scent work of perfumer Brent Leonesio. It was a collaboration between Young, Leonesio and Wilson-Brown for The Institute for Art and Olfaction.
ABOUT TBD
TBD (to be determined) is a musical play and video conceived by Austin Young to serve as a unique collaborative experience. TBD emphasized process, chance, play, interaction, spontaneous creativity, participation and community building.
Over a 3 week period in July and August 2013, the darling public was invited to attend one or more production-related workshops.
Workshop participants were cast in starring and supporting roles, created the dialogue, costumes, music, movement and sets related to the theme ‘coming of age’. In short, the participants became co-creators of the final piece.
This shared experience culminated in a co-authored musical play, performed publically in three participatory dress rehearsals. The piece also culminated in a video and an illustrated screenplay.
ABOUT AUSTIN YOUNG
austinyoung.com
Austin young is a pop-culture architect, photographer and trans media artist. Young has been documenting pop, celebrity, sub, and trans culture since 1985 through portraiture. Young’s video works play with pop-culture and camp, celebrity, gender and identity. His photographs have been featured in major publications such as Interview Magazine, OK, and Flaunt and have been in solo exhibitions and projects at LACMA (Los Angeles, CA), Machine Project (Los Angeles, CA), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Berkeley Art Museum (Berkley, California); and as well as groups shows at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles, CA) and Stephen Cohen Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). They have been shown at festivals including Frameline, MIX. In addition to photography and filmmaking, Young is co-founder of Fallen Fruit, an art collective who use fruit as a common denominator to change the way you think about the world. Fallen Fruit has had major exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum; Salt Lake Art Center (Salt Lake City, Utah), Machine Project, Matadero (Madrid, Spain); LACE (Los Angeles) and ARS Electronic (Austria). Fallen Fruit is a Creative Capital grantee for 2013 and just completed LA counties first public fruit park in Del Aire with a grant from the LA County Art’s commission.
ABOUT BRENT LEONESIO
smellbent.com
Brent Leonesio is an artist, perfumer and the creator of Smell Bent. Brent’s career began after studying art and art history at Sarah Lawrence College. He honed his aesthetic while working in the fashion industry, designing clothing and accessories for the brand 12th Street by Cynthia Vincent. While pursuing a career in the world of design, Brent discovered his passion for perfume. Within a few years, he became a man obsessed – reading, sniffing and even tinkering on his own projects. In 2009, facing the closing of the company for which he’d been working, Brent decided to seize an opportunity and created his own business. He began smell bent with little more than his unemployment checks and a playful dream. But smell bent proved to be more than a dream, and his passion project soon became his career. Since then, Brent’s work has found an audience on a global scale. His whimsical scents have made fans both on the Internet and in the retail market, and his work has grown to encompass fine fragrance, gallery work, artistic collaborations, custom and commercial formulations, teaching and recently, the creation of a smell bent comic book.
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