Disgust, Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Surprise

Disgust, Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Surprise places emphasis on art abstracted to its essential form and exhibits the creative disconnect associated with the seemingly empty shelves. At the core of this piece is Paul Ekman's research of the six basic human emotions from which all other emotions are derived. Inspired by Sol Lewitt's machine-like method of planning and decision-making and Eva Hesse's use of mindless repetition, the replication of shelves suggests assembly lines and factories in which there is no room for emotions. The six intangible emotions are impossible to assess when not represented by anything except space. In addition, this piece resembles methods of psychotherapy in conjunction with minimalism, in which repetition and instruction are provided as means of control.

sol lewitt and other inspiration from the textbook

I took inspiration from Sol Lewitt's work in the Contingent Object of Contemporary Art's chapter Authorship and Authority.
I like the idea of minimalism as the ideal form/reduced to the essential elements. The cubic shapes are no-nonsense and pure.
In minimalism, the artist becomes disconnected from the work once it's complete. The connection is severed and is then given to the viewer.

Sol Lewitt said "When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art." By following a set of instructions, the installation becomes another form of creative disconnect.

This correlates with the training and expectation of emotional reactions to art. 

art and fear

Revisited Art and Fear when trying to invent new meanings to the shelves without the cubes, particularly of finishing art that doesn't appear to be finished.
Making art ABOUT making art is pretty ambitious but I think is similar to my poetry class in which a few people wrote their weekly poems about not having ideas for poems. Making art is such an emotional thing for me, so by inserting emotions into art I'm facing fears about them. I wanted to persevere in the face of defeat, and without the cubes this piece still needed to make sense.

emotions as minimalism

That emotions are such complex subjective experiences is why I wanted to pair them with minimalism. A lot of my art lately has been about trying to regain control over things that are lost. By not having any representation of emotion present in the artwork, it's saying two distinctly different things: that you can see through emotions, and that you can't see emotions at all. I've been doing a lot of reading about areas of the brain associated with different emotions and found that the neurocircuitry is pretty chemically regulated for a species with extreme highs and lows. The physical energy is discharged by neurochemicals dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin to allow us to emotionally react as expected.
The experience of emotions can't be seen between/among social groups unless we choose to share them, however they can share the same physiological responses through social cognition which generally develops in adolescence.
The emotions' presence on the shelves is showcasing them as something organizable and displayable, which also works in psychotherapy through categorizing and regulating. Also the instruction typically given in minimalist art is comparable to instruction given in psychological assessment.

Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman's work is very far removed from my own but I've been looking at her photographs so frequently that they accidentally seeped into the creative part of my mind, especially during my research of human emotions.

I read a fairly gratuitous article about how Francesca Woodman is "the Sylvia Plath of Photography", comparing their young suicides and artistic legacies and how in retrospect you can see death among their art.

I think in terms of forcing emotion into art, Woodman is the greatest example I know. I see ghosts when I look at these. She uses her body as a material which is really interesting to me in terms of the chemical makeup of bodies. How are we different from paint and turpentine? How are our minds different from materials if our organs are just matter after all? To me Woodman's photographs are physical renderings of human emotions and souls.

Floating Shelves

These are the instructions for building floating shelves I used with a few manipulations by Tom.

The minimalism-inspired shelves are white (same color as the wall) to not call attention to them as art forms, when in fact they are the base for the "assembled form".

Emotion/Pain Charts

 

Range of expressions for emotions. The only way we can measure them??

 

If emotion/pain detectors rely solely on facial expression, what happens when that facial expression is absent?
It's our way of making something abstract into a concrete thing we can see and analyze. Without asking someone how they "feel", their faces often give it away.
Additionally, this pain chart indicates that something as intangible as pain is easier to assess when paired with different degrees of frowns.

Disgust, Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Surprise

Disgust, happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and surprise are six emotions considered universal across cultures. All other emotions can be classified as products of combinations of these six.
I've researched Paul Ekman's tests for studying emotions in terms of facial expressions, and our general association of a smiling person as a happy person, a frowning person as an angry person, etc.

Using muscles in brows and mouths, we are able to express an atlas of emotions.
Right now I'm interested in the loss of facial expressions in communication online and through cellphones. (with the exception of emojis indicative of those muscles used).

sketch of ideas