emotions

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Art

Mercurial Emotions Carved into New Glitched Sculptures by Yoshitoshi Kanemaki

Japanese sculptor Yoshitoshi Kanemaki (previously) captures the emotional complexities of youth in his glitched 3-dimensional portraits. Kanemaki carves tree trunks into figures—often young women—whose faces are multiplied in expressions that range from distressed to joyful in a single sculpture. The figures’ casual, natural poses seem to capture them in real time: some of the artist’s characters perch on chairs mid-conversation, and others gesture with their arms to express confidence or bashfulness. In his finished works, Kanemaki usually uses lifelike coloring, but for one recent sculpture shown in detail below, the artist experimented with creating the sensation of an out-of-focus image by using soft, blurred shapes and colors to complete the expression. See more of the sculptor’s finished and in-progress works on Instagram and Facebook. (via Hi-Fructose)

Art Illustration

Solitary Worlds Explored in New Psychological Drawings by Stefan Zsaitsits

Solitary protagonists investigate, embrace, or hide from emotions in evocative new drawings by Stefan Zsaitsits. The Austrian artist (previously) depicts individuals in situations that balance relatable everyday moments with surreal twists. Sitting at a dining table, one subject snorkels into the tablecloth, while another inexplicably emerges on a ladder from the seat of a chair. Zsaitsits works in pencil on paper, using crosshatching for shading and white-penciled details for subtle emphasis.

The artist shares with Colossal that, following his participation in Drawing Now in Paris, his work in currently on view in a group exhibition in Munich, Germany at Størpunkt gallery. An upcoming solo show at Vienna’s Gallery Gans opens in May. Explore more of Zsaitsits’s drawings on Behance and take them home with his latest book, House Drawings.

Art

New Stoneware Animals Fraught With Human Emotion by Beth Cavener

Beth Cavener (previously here and here) creates large animals that each appear to wrestle against their implied captivity. The works can be viewed as animals in the throes of domestication, however beneath the surface lies a peek into our own human psychology. Cavener projects these emotions onto her sculpted clay figures, showcasing the primitive animal instincts that lie beneath our own exteriors.

“Both human and animal interactions show patterns of intricate, subliminal gestures that betray intent and motivation,” said Cavener in an artist statement. “The things we leave unsaid are far more important than the words spoken out-loud to one another. I have learned to read meaning in the subtler signs; a look, the way one holds one’s hands, the incline of the head, and the slightest unconscious gesture. I rely on animal body language in my work as a metaphor for these underlying patterns, transforming the animal subjects into human psychological portraits.

Cavener’s solo exhibition The Other opens on November 15th at Jason Jacques Gallery in NYC, and runs through December 5, 2017. You can view more of the artist’s work on her website.

Animation

Wiggly Noodle People Appear to Disintegrate in a Bizarre New Animation by Ari Weinkle

Boston-based digital artist and designer Ari Weinkle reflects on the physical effects of negative emotions in a new experimental video that shows human forms imploding, melting, morphing, and disappearing. Titled ‘Moodles,’ and set to a backdrop of electronic music, the short video features a series of anonymous solitary figures constructed out of ombre strands. The strands initially follow the body’s contour lines but quickly squiggle into piles, sink holes, or walls.

Weinkle writes about the project, “Moodles is a short animation based on the effects of negative emotions on one’s self. It turns built up tension, stress, and anxiety into creative catharsis. Frozen figures – once paralyzed by moods – are reduced to heaps of flexible nothingness.” You can see more of the artist’s work on Behance and Instagram.

Art

Extremes of Human Nature Explored through Hand-Built Stoneware Animals by Beth Cavener

Washington-based artist Beth Cavener sculpts human-sized animals from clay and other materials in both dramatically overt and subtly ambiguous displays of emotion. Hung from ropes or pinned to walls, the anthropomorphic sculptures are infused with juxtapositions that depict the extremes of both human emotion and animalistic behavior: predator and prey, love and hate, fear and peace. “On the surface,” shares Cavener, “these figures are simply feral animals suspended in a moment of tension. Beneath the surface, they embody the consequences of human fear, apathy, aggression, and misunderstanding.”

Cavener collaborates with a variety of artists in her work, including Alessandro Gallo, who designed and painted the ornate Japanese tattoos on the nineteen-foot long anaconda snake depicted in Tangled Up in You seen below. There’s much more to see over on her website and several studio views on Hi-Fructose. All images courtesy the artist.

Art

Beautiful Thoughts: Artist Lisa Park Manipulates Water with Her Mind

Conceptual artist Lisa Park has been experimenting with a specialized device called a NeuroSky EEG headset that helps transform brain activity into streams of data that can be manipulated for the purposes of research, or in this case, a Fluxus-inspired performance art piece titled Eunoia (Greek for “beautiful thought”). Park used the EEG headset to monitor the delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves of her brain as well as eye movements and transformed the resulting data with specialized software into sound waves. Five speakers are placed under shallow dishes of water which then vibrate in various patterns in accordance with her brain activity.

While the system is not an exact science, Park rehearsed for nearly a month by thinking about specific people whom she had strong emotional reactions to. The artist then correlated each of the five speakers with certain emotions: sadness, anger, hatred, desire, and happiness. According to the Creator’s Project her hope had been to achieve a sort of zen-like state resulting in complete silence, however it proved to be ultimately unattainable, a result that is actually somewhat poetic.

It’s important to note that artists have long been using EEG devices to create “music with the mind”. Composer and experimental musician Alvin Lucier had a somewhat similar performance called Music for Solo Performer back in 1965. Read more about Euonia over on the Creator’s Project. (via booooooom)