Moments to Process: Video Clip, 2020
This is a brief video showcasing the various elements in my thesis installation. The lights pulsate to music from artists I listen to who I felt represented the emotions I associated with each color. Every color had a positive and negative emotion tied to it. For example; pink being vanity and healing, I felt that Ariana Grande fit that, 7 rings being vain, and needy being her healing. Carly Rae Jepsen is Red for passion and frustration, Olivia O'Brien is purple for awareness and hopeless, and so on. i ended up doing all female artists, primarily because that's what I listen to, but I felt like women express their emotions better than men, and the music industry strongly shows that. A female artist will have a range of music about a range of emotional experiences, whereas most male artists write about their experiences with love. Originally I was going to have no audio until I got feedback that there's no way for the audience to connect to the audio, so all the tracks play at once.
Moments to Process: Still
With the help of my professor, Brian Wasson; I created 8 lights that are all synced to music, and I tied two emotions to each color; one positive and one negative. I already talked about the lights being synced to music with the video, but I use light to show emotion itself as both light and emotion do not have a physical form, but have a physical host and the phenomenon of both extend beyond the host to impact their surroundings. Also featured are hearts in the walls made of resin, sand, and ice. Then the projection of a heart (also used in Serenity) and my concrete heart being the center focus as it has strong representation the physical body where the others discuss more of the metaphysical body.
Absorption
I used varying sizes in the molds for all the hearts on the walls. I wanted to create a heart that shows how we are susceptible to hold onto the emotions from others around us, but finding a clear material that doesn't already have a well established contemporary context was tricky. Glass is fragile, so that fragility would be tied to the hearts instead of absorption, and Ice melts so it has an idea of fleeting or impermanence. I ended up using resin due to it not having a whole lot of historical context, but also because of the way it absorbed and refracted the light. It has the notion of preservation, but in this situation it acts similarly to the lights; the refraction from the light extends the emotions beyond the resin's physical form and affects its surroundings as well. The resin ended up being the perfect material for this idea, because even when we are impacted by the emotions of others, our emotions extend beyond our physical host.
Passing Time: Detail/Thesis Install, 2020
I used varying sizes in the molds for all the hearts on the walls. This is the latest iteration of my sand heart series. I decided for my thesis that it would be more impactful to have the hearts made of frozen sand and ice on the wall to blend in with the resin hearts. The ideas between the frozen hearts are very similar, but with the addition of sand I wanted to add a notion of time passing and the emotions of the past still affecting ones life. Most emotions fade over time, and they are often forgotten, but some emotional experiences will never fade; the happiest day of your life, the pain of losing something or someone you love, or the range of negative emotions that stem from trauma. Those moments may pass, but those memories last, and that is what the use of the sand is for here.
Fleeting: Thesis Install
Fleeting
I used varying sizes in the molds for all the hearts on the walls. This is the latest iteration of my ice heart series. I decided for my thesis that it would be more impactful to have the hearts made of frozen sand and ice on the wall to blend in with the resin hearts. The ideas between the frozen hearts are very similar, but ice is more straightforward than the frozen sand. The idea with ice relates to how intense a sensation can be from the cold of ice to the overwhelming experience of intense emotions. Ice and emotion are a temporary state of existence, that will morph into something else. For ice it'll become water, for emotion, it will become a new state of mind, and both existences are a less harsh than how they were at the start of this sensation.
This is the first iteration of my ice heart series. The ideas between the frozen hearts are very similar, but ice is more straightforward than the frozen sand. The idea with ice relates to how intense a sensation can be from the cold of ice to the overwhelming experience of intense emotions. Ice and emotion are a temporary state of existence, that will morph into something else. For ice it'll become water, for emotion, it will become a new state of mind, and both existences are a less harsh than how they were at the start of this sensation.
Passing Time: Stack, 2019
Passing Time: Detail
This was the beginning of my sand heart series. I was using the idea of frozen hearts for my thesis, and I wasn't sure how to display them. The ideas between the frozen hearts are very similar, but with the addition of sand I wanted to add a notion of time passing and the emotions of the past still affecting ones life. Most emotions fade over time, and they are often forgotten, but some emotional experiences will never fade; the happiest day of your life, the pain of losing something or someone you love, or the range of negative emotions that stem from trauma. Those moments may pass, but those memories last, and that is what the use of the sand is for here. With this version, it became a more dramatic version with these emotional memories being stacked on top of each other. I see it as some could be good, but some could be bad, and when emotions get stacked on top of the other it becomes a lot for one to handle.
Serenity
This is a piece I revisited in 2020, the 2019 version is a lot different, but it's also not my favorite. With this piece, I was beginning my thinking of color association to emotion. I started with the idea of serenity with looking at Plutchik's wheel of emotion, but found that yellow was more mind numbing than serene for me. I spent time thinking about what colors bring a joyful relaxation, but also searching through images on google that appeared with "aesthetic" images. I then settled on pink, blue, violet, and orange. I took 6 ready made lights that connect to one another, and gels. Three were tied to Plutchik's ideas, then 3 of my ideas/research, and it's this idea that there's different versions of color to emotion associations dependent on the viewer. Then with the subtle projection of the heart; I wanted a heart that had a physical presence, but wasn't truly physical. It was this idea of wanting to feel a certain way, but never being able to truly feel it, hence the subtly.
heart Animation by Sabrina echouafni
Foggy then Clear
This work was an exploration into ideas of hyperreality and emotion, and I think I was overreaching with ideas here. However through this work I would revisit this idea in the matter of the projected heart; this idea of wanting to experience an emotion but never truly feeling it no matter how much you force yourself to feel that way. This work also shows another iteration of hearts in my work with balloon hearts. I wanted to make hearts from a clear material, but have one surrounded by fog, and the other be clear of the fog. I bought a fog machine for this piece, but I wasn't allowed to use the fog machine in the space, except if it was contained, so I filled one balloon with fog. These balloons kept deflating a lot, and that showed me a context to balloons I wasn't thinking of at the time, but I am thinking of revisiting later on. With them deflating it relates to breath, and with breath it relates back to the body.
Dying Inside, 2018
This was the beginning of my exploration into the concepts of emotion, and the use of hearts. This came from having Demi Lovato's song Sober stuck in my head for months after her overdose. The part where she says "Cause I'm dying inside" played on a loop while I was sketching, and the idea of a concrete heart came to me. This work acted as an outlet for all the heavy emotions I was feeling from suffering and loosing so much the year before, then nearly loosing the one person who made it all better; this work was everything I was in therapy for. All because of this work, and all because of Demi Lovato a flood of ideas came, and this is where the start of when emotion became the focus of my work.
Calm
This was towards the beginning of working through my thesis. It was more a experimentation with materials I was interested in using, and the start of an exploration into emotion with the idea of creating a relaxing space. Prior to this installation, I had done another installation utilizing these LED rope lights, and explored the nature of curved lines and the association of how emotional people draw lines with curves. This was also made shortly after the concrete heart, when the heart started to become prominent. This work is the beginning of when these ideas were starting to come to fruition.
