Studio Practice
Raeta includes an experimental studio practice that explores scent as a conceptual and artistic medium. The work investigates fragrance as image, memory, and spatial experience through installations, site-specific projects, and olfactory experiments.
Grounded in founder Alia Malley’s background in photography and film, this practice approaches scent through the lens of visual and time-based media. It draws on principles of composition, narrative, and image-making, translating them into olfactory form.
Through collaborations with artists, curators, galleries, and cultural institutions, Alia explores what fragrance can communicate and how it can be experienced. This ongoing work informs all aspects of scent creation at Raeta, resulting in projects that sit at the intersection of perfumery, contemporary art, and sensory research.
Selected Projects
LAID
LAID
100ml fragrance, hand-embossed vintage CK One bottle,
unique 1/1, 2025
as a part of the exhibition SeXObjects, curated by Hannah Sloan
Craig Krull Gallery, 2025
Notes: Boozy dive bars / Wonderbras beneath baby tees / second-hand leather jackets / Bad boys driving vintage black Cadillacs down Sunset Blvd at 2am / cigarettes after sex and mornings of regret / lipstick and videotape / the static of charged air at the threshold of digital / the shimmer of possibility
Before the internet mediated desire, Generation X—my generation—learned about sex through experience: messy, human, and unfiltered. Our education unfolded in bedrooms, cars, and nightclubs entered with fake IDs, soundtracked by the ragged defiance of Courtney Love and the unapologetic fury of 1990s riot grrrl feminism. Unlike our younger counterparts, we came of age—and defined ourselves sexually—before the onslaught of internet porn and the slow erosion of intimacy brought on by smartphones and digital distraction. In an era when a screen can dull the libido and physical sex is in decline, that pre-internet reality of tangible, erotic self-discovery feels like a bygone luxury, as imperfect as it was.
SeXObjects at Craig Krull Gallery playfully and earnestly revisits that visceral era, when intimacy was chaotic, risky, and real—before swipes, screens, and algorithms reprogrammed how we connect and feel. Fueled by nostalgia and yearning, the exhibition invites viewers back into a tactile, pre-internet universe, when desire was discovered in the hushed corners of sex shops, the thrill of a secret club, or the glossy pages of a magazine—through the work of six artists whose contributions are challenging, personal, honest, and sex-positive.
Interdisciplinary artist Alia Malley presents Laid, a custom scent that conjures the messy, smoky, chaotic intimacy of pre-internet sexual adolescence. Notes of boozy dive bars, second-hand leather jackets, cigarettes, and charged static evoke nights full of chemistry, adventure, and sticky vulnerability. Housed in a vintage CK One bottle that denotes the transitional era of the 1990s, the scent is an invitation: viewers can dip a blotter into the open bottle and carry it through the gallery, engaging with desire on their own terms. “Everything was grainy with sloppy borders, like a 35mm party photo from a Yashica T4.” Malley writes, “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.”
-Hannah Sloan, curator
LAID
3g solid perfume, edition of 25
Created to accompany the exhibition SeXObjects
2025
LEVIATHAN
Leviathan
60ml fragrance, hand-dipped bottle in oil-based epoxy, bell jar
unique 1/1, 2025
as a part of the exhibition dis/comfort, curated by Katie Ione Craney
University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2025
Notes: Arctic air / oceanic depth / 16th century whale bones / seaweed / moss / fog / brine / diesel / hubris
dis/comfort asks how Northern identity, colonialism, and climate change can be imagined and interpreted through layers of comfort and discomfort. Artists share encounters and intimacies with the North through video, photography, carving, embroidery, an interactive card game, a protest poem, and 2-dimensional works printed on photo transparencies. A range of experiences and stories unfold, asking viewers to consider their own comfort and reflect on the broader contexts of how dis/comfort shapes living in and visiting the North.
-Katie Ione Craney, curator
