Sita Bhaumik ’02 has always approached the world with a kind and critical eye. She never criticized me when we would look at a piece of art, and I had no idea what the piece meant, but she has always given me a new way to examine and maybe understand what I was looking at.
It is no surprise that Sita’s solo show, “To Curry Favor: Scented Works on Paper,” recently featured by the San Francisco Examiner, gives us a new way to examine race and class issues through our sense of smell, particularly a blend often used in cooking: curry.
Sita’s show, which closed recently after six weeks at 18 Reasons in San Francisco, brought about an interesting discussion between us that hasn’t happened often since we left Scripps College. She wanted people to understand the connection between scent and culture: “We do it all the time with sight, but we can’t expect it to stop at the visual. Our others senses are connected.”
But why curry? “If you Google curry, you find delicious recipes. But trying searching for ‘curry’ and ‘smell’; there are endless entries about how strong or bad it smells. It is a very polarizing substance,” says Sita. “I even found a Yahoo! Answers posting that said, ‘Help, my neighbor’s house smells like curry, what do I do?’ One person responded ‘Call the INS.'”
The exhibit was filled with aspects of home: gold plates covered in a layer of Japanese curry and covered in chocolate wrappers, lace reminiscent of your grandmothers’ tablecloths covered with an Anglo-Indian curry. It is all meant to be welcoming, but the overwhelming smell of curry forces you to reconcile your own associations with smell and memory.
While many associate curry with Indian food, Sita points out the chili is originally from the New World, and curry powder existed only after the British colonization of India. Until the 1500’s there were no chilies in India. “India without chili is like Ireland without potatoes and Italy without tomatoes. In fact, those three key ingredients all came from the New World.”
Sita believes that the process of learning to think critically came from her education at Scripps College. “My fascination with social conspiracy theories and questioning the obvious really developed during my time at Scripps,” she says. Bhaumik majored in studio arts at Scripps and is currently in graduate school at the California College of the Arts working on a dual degree in visual and critical studies in fine art.
Sita intends to keep questioning as she has done with both her senior art project at Scripps College and her current shows.