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The Chisenhale Gallery smells weirdly sweet. Somewhere between butter and Parma Violets, but more acrid, intensely chemical. It’s an olfactory assault, half soothing and familiar, half violent and unnatural.

That’s the strange, unsettling middle ground that young London-based artist Racheal Crowther likes to inhabit. Just look at what she has done here in her first institutional exhibition, in which baby pink gentleness and terrifying hard-edged military aesthetics collide.

The gallery is painted in soft pastel tones, but in the centre of the space sits a huge army mobile health unit, made in the US but used by British forces. You walk through it as if you’re making your way to be assessed by some tired medic in fatigues, as if your body is about to be processed by the state. The smell changes in here, the odour of buttery candy swapped for the overpowering stench of rubber. There are signs of the health unit’s former purpose everywhere – chemical warnings, triage questionnaires, evacuation plans, resuscitation diagrams – but they’re only hints. Like a more paranoid Mike Nelson installation, there’s no full narrative, just an empty office that once housed military personnel in dangerous places.

Crowther bought the mobile health unit in a military auction. It came filled with discarded paperwork, one document – an A4 piece of paper stuck on the wall – shows that it had been used as part of decontamination efforts after the failed 2018 assassination attempt on double agent Sergei Skripal with the nerve agent novichok. Suddenly you’re thinking is that smell really rubber, or something more sinister?

The tension of Crowther’s installation is immediately obvious: this structure was built to sustain life, but in the name of war and conflict. It was designed to help you, to care for you, but you are just a tool of the state, an asset to be expended.

That paint on the gallery’s walls and ceilings is Baker-Miller pink, also called drunk tank pink, an experimental colour used in US jail cells to soothe angry perps. Then there’s that sweetly putrid odour. If it smells familiar that’s because Crowther created it out of substances associated with the production of powdered milk – life-saving, synthetic, industrially produced sustenance. There’s another scent molecule in here, too – hexadecanal, a natural compound found on human skin. A study revealed that it reduced aggression in men, but triggered it in women. It’s emitted in abundant amounts from the heads of newborn babies. A chemical manipulator.

This whole show is Crowther imagining colour and scent as a psyop, exploring how these basic aspects of human life – light and odour – can be industrialised, militarised and used against us.

She is asking what is health when it’s controlled by the state? Whose purpose is being served by you being fit and strong? Who benefits when you’re cared for by industry, by the military, by the government or by corporations?

You walk through the space being torn between ideas of care and exploitation. Are you being nurtured and soothed, or manipulated and used?

It’s all headspinningly paranoid and odorously intense. A milk-vomit-reeking military industrial freakout, like the weirdest depths of a terrible, conspiratorial Reddit thread made real. Conceptual installation art that stings the nostrils, messes with your head … and makes you incredibly suspicious of your GP.

• At Chisenhale Gallery, London, until 14 June