GETTING LAID: The Artist Statement, Tarkovsky, and Being Drunk in a Hollywood Alley in 1996

Part 1

Jan 12, 2026

GET LAID AT CRAIG KRULL

SeXObjects closes next Saturday, January 17, so this week I’m sharing a series of three posts about my process of making Laid. The show is smart and fun, and even Carolina A. Miranda agrees. To mark the closing, I’ll be doing a gallery walkthrough and artist talk with Jean Lowe and Hannah Sloan next Saturday, January 17, at 11am.

I’ve just quit my adjunct teaching gig and am generally trying to shed my academic art skin because the structure feels broken. (If anyone wants to chat about making the current state of arts education more equitable, hit me up).

That said, I’ll start here with my artist statement to provide some context for the project. The next two posts will devolve into thoughts on working with scent under the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky, and being drunk in an alley in Hollywood in 1996.

PART 1: ARTIST STATEMENT

LAID

100 ml liquid scent, 2025

by Alia Malley

Commissioned for SeXObjects, curated by Hannah Sloan, Craig Krull Gallery, November 29, 2025 - January 17, 2026

Notes of:

boozy dive bars / Wonderbras beneath baby tees / second-hand leather jackets / cigarettes after sex and mornings of regret / videotape / the ozonic static of charged air at the threshold of digital / the shimmer of possibility

Laid is an analog snapshot of sexual coming-of-age in the pre-internet era. It was a time that was messy, smoky, boozy, sweaty, chaotic, and beautiful, full of adventure and regret. Everything was grainy with sloppy borders, like a 35mm party photo from a Yashica T4. It was a time about bodies, connection, and chemistry. There were complex systems at work, but they were human—instinctual and organic in nature, not machine-driven or derived. We had no idea what we were doing, but we did it anyway.

This was a time before our most intimate human moments were mediated by machines. There was no algorithm deciding anything for us. It all unfolded in real time, in real life, and in real space. Mistakes were made all the time: you’d go to a party and end up making out with your boyfriend’s roommate in a closet. You were probably drunk, and he had always smelled good anyway. What else were you supposed to do?

For Laid, I’ve repurposed a vintage CK One bottle, not as nostalgia, but as material evidence of that era’s transitional moment. The 1990s were the bridge between analog and digital, between touch and text.

CK One was the scent of my Gen X ‘90s. It was a cool, transparent distillation of the decade’s shifting ideas of gender and desire, built on notes of citrus, green woods, and clean skin musk. It was everywhere: on the waif models and It Girls, the indie rockers like me and my (next) boyfriend buying it at Tower Records, the LA/NY/London tri-coastal creative class we aspired to become, and our non-binary friends who didn’t yet have that word. Like the fragrance, the ad campaign was omnipresent, translating this new minimalism into image: Kate Moss and her grunge-inflected friends in white tanks, bare-faced, confident and androgynous youth rendered in grayscale. It drained the saturated We Are the World optimism of the Benetton ads of the 1980s, replacing it with detachment, a Come As You Are authenticity, and a new, affectless cool. We no longer thought, looked, or smelled like our Boomer parents.

Laid takes its name from the 1993 album by James, produced by Brian Eno, a CD I literally carried around in my mini-backpack. It was introspective yet layered, textural in both body and sensuality, irreverent and playful even as it circled the end-of-century unease that was beginning to surface. “I’m a member of an ape-like race at the asshole end of the twentieth century,” Tim Booth sings on “Low Low Low”. It’s part confession, part prophecy, a prelude to the low-flying panic attack that Radiohead’s OK Computer would crystallize only a few years later, as we careened toward Y2K.

On a more sober note, this was also a time before a cultural emphasis on consent as we understand it today: bad, terrible decisions were made all the time. In SeXObjects, Laid is here to offer consent. To engage with the piece, the viewer decides to dip a perfume blotter test strip into the bottle’s opening. This can be taken with them as they walk through the exhibition. The viewer has agency in how they wish to engage—or not.

Ultimately, what I’m describing here was a generational moment: too diffuse to be captured completely by one scent in one exhibition. Like the era itself, Laid resists closure. Sometimes all we can do is offer containment.

I poured Laid as a solid scent in an edition of 25. Only a few remain, available here.

SeXObjects continues at Craig Krull Gallery through Saturday, January 17th.
I’ll be doing a walkthrough and artist talk with Jean Lowe and Hannah Sloan on Saturday, January 17th, at 11am

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