What do room fresheners have to do with Shaniqwa Jarvis’s new exhibition? For the first time, the multimedia artist and photographer has harnessed the power of fragrance to add a new sensory layer to her work.
Running through April 12 at Anthony Gallery in Chicago, “If You Can See My Thoughts, You Would See Your Faces” features a gorgeous series of fine-art photographs, painted textiles, and a new video work that blends archival footage from Jarvis’s childhood with recent clips and photos. A chorus of voices—including Jarvis’s own and those of her friends, family, and other creatives—underscores the video, engaging in stream-of-consciousness discussions about art, motherhood, and work. Through the exhibition, Jarvis delves into the overlap between personal memory and universal experience, reconnecting with her younger self by cross-referencing images she created early in her career with more recent shots and noting the enduring similarities. Given that scent is the sense most strongly tied to memory, incorporating it into this show made sense.
So, she created Whiffworld, a fragrance brand, with her longtime friend (and the cofounder of Opening Ceremony) Carol Lim. Its two debut room fresheners, Cowboy Cologne and Money Tree, are displayed throughout the exhibition. “Everyone who’s on set with me knows that I’m always trying to get the vibe right via scent,” Jarvis shares. “Carol was like, ‘You’re always talking about nostalgia baths and how scent will take you all the way back. Let’s just do it.’ ”
Best known for her intimate and evocative portraiture, Jarvis has captured the likes of Barack Obama, Erykah Badu, Lupita Nyong’o, and Olivia Rodrigo for a slate of today’s top publications. She’s lensed campaigns for Nike and Adidas, and she even shot a fashion editorial for Bazaar. But beyond her commercial work, Jarvis’s fine-art practice has also earned her critical acclaim. In February, Jarvis presented work at Frieze art fair in Los Angeles, where her pieces were acquired by MAC3 , a collective of L.A.-based art institutions comprising the Hammer Museum, LACMA, and MOCA. And in coordination with her new show, she released the second edition of her debut self-titled and -published photo book earlier this month.
Below, Jarvis speaks with Bazaar about putting together her new exhibition and what it’s like to having best friendship scents.
This show is about nostalgia and reconnecting with a younger version of yourself. Tell me about why you wanted to go down that path.
I think that I’ve been on a continuation of theme, feeling, and introspection for the last four shows that I’ve put out into the world. I’ve really been connecting back with this theory I have that you are born with your lifeline, and whatever is going to be will be. There are certain things that can pull you away from that, but, ultimately, no matter what you do, you’re going to live that line. With the show that I did a few years ago, “Everywhere you go, There you are,” that idea was thrown into my face. I was shooting stuff and then looking back into my archives, and I saw that I had taken the exact same photographs like 20 years ago. Not in the same spaces, but with very similar themes, very similar shadow play—just similar-feeling work. The solo show I did at Frieze [in Los Angeles], “If You Could See My Thoughts, You Would See Your Faces,” and this show are wrapped around the same feeling of, like, What is the universe trying to teach me? What are my ancestors trying to remind me?
When you were creating the new works, were you making them from a point of view of knowing you wanted to do this specific show? Or was this something where you looked at work that you’d already made and found a theme in it you wanted to build upon?
It was a little bit of the latter. I took some work from “Everywhere you go, There you are” and made maybe six new pieces. Ultimately, the film is the newest thing; no one’s seen it [before]. I’ve been working on it for a while. It’s something I think I’ll keep working on; hopefully I’ll show the next part whenever I exhibit new work. And I think the photographs [in the show] were to ground the film. When you’re walking through the exhibition, you’re like, Oh, I think I get it. And then you watch the film, and you’re like, Oh. And then you come back out and do it again.
It was interesting watching people do that at the opening and then coming up to talk to me about what they thought everything meant. It was really beautiful too, because sometimes when you’re making work you’re just in your head; maybe you’re conversing with your spirit guides and your friends and advisers who help you. So it was really great to hear people who I do not know talking about things that they saw and what they felt from an image. It was great to know that what’s running in my head is running in a bunch of other people’s heads too.
It must be really exciting to see what different people connect with and how they interpret things because of their own lived experience.
Definitely. There’s so much craziness going on in the world that’s so divisive, and I think that a lot of the things that I’m always reaching back for is to remind myself and others that we’re all so similar. A lot of us were raised in the same way. A lot of us have gone through the similar experiences. Although we look different and we come from different places, there’s definitely a connective tissue between all of us. For some people, it’s a spiritual thing; for some people, it’s physical. I’m really trying to remind all of us that you can’t run from who you are. You really have to know who you are and ground yourself in that. And then that allows you to be open and connect with others. Connectivity is such a big part of my every day and my heart, and I’m always trying to push that.
You’re obviously known for your portraiture and commercial work in which you photograph other people, but this show is very introspective; it’s about capturing parts of you and your life and showing that to the world. How do you approach those two sides of your practice? How do they fulfill you in different ways?
First of all, I often find that when I’m asked to describe my commercial work versus my fine-art practice, I’m always like, “The through line is me; it’s my lived experience.” So when I’m photographing celebrities, I approach them in the same way that I would a floral arrangement. It’s with tenderness, it’s with kindness, it’s with empathy, and it’s always with my full self. Whoever has met me, whoever has sat for me, they get that, and that’s ultimately how I get them to relax and be themselves. Within all of my still life, floral, and landscape work, I approach it in the same way. I’m not necessarily talking to [my subjects]—maybe I’m talking to myself in my head—but to me, they’re very similar. They both inform each other.
Tell me about going through all of your archival footage and choosing what to include in your new video work.
One day when I was sick, I was watching a bunch of films, and there was this one called Privilege about women in New York—Faith Ringgold is in it, and one of my childhood best friends who’s also in my film, her mom, Novella Nelson, is in it—and it was just about women talking about their bodies and menopause. It was just like this beautiful art film. I remember watching it and being like, “God, this sounds just like the conversation I’m always having in my head.”
Later, while I was in my studio, I found all of these archival [audio] tapes I’ve been looking for for 15 years. As a kid, I used to take around this tape recorder, and I would record my friends talking, and then I would make them mix tapes with their voices in them. When I told my husband about it, he was like, “Dude, are you gonna do something with this work? This feels so important.” So I decided to take inspiration from of all of those things and make [a video] that just felt like a stream of consciousness of what’s going on in my head. I think so many of us are suffering in silence about so many different things. I wanted to make this piece not just to have my voice running through it, but to have all of these different voices, all of these different ethnicities—people I’ve known since I was three and people I met three years ago—having a conversation.
Another aspect of this show is of course the fragrances. I think it’s so brilliant that you scented it. How did Whiffworld come about, and how did you develop its first two scents?
Carol and I used to run in similar circles, but we became closer friends when we moved within five minutes of each other in LA. We’re both Pisces, and there was something about the link between our souls where we were like, Oh, now we’re new best friends. We’d hang out, we would carpool to places, and in the car we would talk about shit that we wanted to do. I told her I really wanted to make an air freshener, and she was like, “You know what? I want to help you with that. Let’s do that.” And so we did. We sat down and we smelled a lot of things. We’re producing the air fresheners with Joya Studio, so we just worked with them on different scents. Both Cowboy Cologne and Money Tree have so many notes that we both love. Carol had pulled sage from her garden, and we just kept smelling it and rubbing it on our fingers and seeing what it smelled like on her versus me, and we just worked that way.
Having a friendship scent is pretty awesome.
I hope our other friends don’t kill us. It’s like the ultimate BFF necklace or something.
