Reimagining emotion

It was like a prison. Longing to be free, to commune with the rest of society, to be known, and to be loved, and yet so far separated from everyone else. Pain is my burden and language is the cage that locks me inside myself. It was nothing, and yet it was everything. The exorbitant amount of pain that a body can feel is in no way communicable by the ordinary means of language. That is what Elaine Scarry attempts conjecture in her treatise about the history of pain and its expression. Pain runs our world, and yet people find it extremely difficult to discreetly define what exactly it is and its relative experience to others. People relate to shared experiences, but true uniform understanding cannot possibly be broached within the bounds of human language. In this final project, I attempt to shed light on a different form of pain expression, away from language. I will set up a space in which participants will express their emotion of sadness through art. In this place, I will ask the participant to submit the song that makes them personally the saddest. I will ask them to listen once over, and then during their second listen, the subjects will be asked to communicate to me how they are feeling, in their sadness, as the song progresses in the second listening with me in the room. A key aspect of this will also be looking into how these drawings compare to other art forms as this piece is representative of a live display of emotions throughout the song process, rather than being the work of months or years from an artist. I will then ask them to explain their image afterward, including their choices in artistic license. The final pieces of paper will be displayed for the viewing public to see their sadness as expressible through the art they create. The finitude of human expression through vocalized words is something that Christine Kim also explored in her many pieces of art that draw out the traced hand through American Sign language. Her images of the expression of the hand are also out for display, but I wish to achieve a type of expression for emotion that transcends our spoken language as well.

Image #1 Song: Ave Maria, D. 839 by Franz Schubert