EMOChART Gallery 2727 California, Berkeley
Debut Public Event Saturday October 29 7:00-9:00 pm
Closing Event First Friday November 4, 5:30-9:00 pm
Video Presentation about EmoChART
EmoChART installation is a continuation of First Aid for Artists and other wounded souls. Focused on healing collective trauma, the project invites us to check in with ourselves and then share our feelings with others. A visual art/social practice project, EmoChART was developed in response to the COVID pandemic, climate peril, and injustice; the project was initiated to help folks connect, articulate, and visualize feelings by creating a space for reflection and expression of shared felt experiences. Partially funded by the City of Berkeley, the pilot project uses a “feelings chart” translated into glass, sound, and light to help us visualize and externalize our complex emotional landscape.
From April 2021 through August 2022 people were invited to fill out a google form and anonymously indicate what they were feeling. The data was translated into eight basic color groups based loosely on Plutchik's emotion wheel representing relationships between different groups of feelings. EmoChART mapped 32 feelings placed in time and sorted them into eight basic color groups: blue:peaceful, purple/pink: happy, red:angry; orange:fearful, yellow, surprised, green: disgusted, warm grey: bad, cool grey/clear/black: sad. Link to google form feeling's chart here
The Installation at 2727 California presents a sampling of data from 19 different people or times collected through the EmoChART form translated into colorful sintered glass tears handled gently, and tied onto strips of window screen. Each strand maps the data from only one person. The 19 strands of tears hang side by side area in chronological order from when they were felt. Suspended in an empty canvas stretcher frame they suggest a snap-shot portrait, or landscape, of collective feelings .
Changes in the glass tears’ color density or tone correspond to how recently each person experienced the feeling when they filled out the chart. When no feeling was reported to have been experienced in awhile, a gap results in the column of tears.
VIDEO
The video (color, light and music) illuminates the work and provides a larger context for the installation.
To capture and reflect the total of the feelings submitted (and not just the 19 mapped in glass, Richard Jennings composed 32 audio works based on the 32 different feelings, each edited to play between 19 and 33 seconds and arranged them in order of the most often felt reported feeling (loving) to the least often reported feeling (jealous). To accompany the music, Altman created a short digital animation designed to move the eye in particular directions, speeds, and durations while projecting the color corresponding to each feeling through the glass tears. Link to Video
GLASS
Altman uses sintered glass to express the precious tenderness and fragile beauty of broken togetherness. She embraces transparency as a metaphor for overlapping emotions, while light, color, and sound are spiritual experiences for her. The glass tears and video reflect and transmit light in ways she hopes speak of the transient temporal nature of feelings, sensations, emotions, (dis)connections, and embodiment.
Image of Glass Tears
PARTICIPATION
At the debut public event, participants will be able to fill out the EmoChART form (either on-line or on paper) so their data can be included in future works. They will also be given a sheet of stickers to take with them and will have the opportunity to access the video for future viewing.
EmoChART online Form available here:
ARTISTS BIOS
A native of Berkeley, Lynne-Rachel Altman has a background in glass, public art, fine art, industrial design, and social practice. She holds an MFA in Sculpture and Glass with High Distinction from the California College of Arts and Crafts. She is currently serving as co-department head of glass kiln casting and coldworking at The Crucible, an industrial arts center in Oakland. For over thirty years, Altman has been exploring the relationship between studio work and interactive social practice. Her fine art has been featured in numerous national and international galleries and museums. She has been lead artist on a number of public and artist-initiated architectural projects in the San Francisco Bay Area.
You can learn more about Lynne-Rachel Altman here:
https://www.lynnerachelaltman.com/
Altman hopes EmoChART can offer the space for us to check in with ourselves and then share our feelings with others.
Richard Jennings is an award winning composer known for his original musicals, and numerous scores and soundtracks for theater, film, and television. On the cutting edge of electronic music, Jennings was a pioneer in early Moog composition and active in the New Music/Avant Garde movement. He has a background in education, teaching voice and leading electronic programs at a number of colleges and universities. Jennings recently composed the acclaimed music for the current production of Much Ado About Nothing at San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, and is the Artistic Director and a founder of Musical Cafe, a musical developmental program that has launched some of the Bay Area’s most successful new musicals.
You can learn more about Richard Jennings here:
Altman and Jennings, Berkeley residents and longtime friends, created the Fairy Music Farm at Fairyland in Oakland. EmoChART is their second project together.