8 Emotions
An installation by Joell Jones and Anne Hege at Oakland’s Fort Creativity Center reminds us to stop, look, listen and feel…
Original Score by Anne K Hege
by
Paintings by Joell Jones
Listen to the audio that accompanies each piece
Flow
Bursting
Conflict
Cluster
Pain
Guide
Energy
Locked
Interview
SUSAN KUCHINSKAS
On the Arts
Sound adds depth to installation
SIMPLICITY IS DECEPTIVE: If you’re like us, you find it all too easy to skate through art shows. “That’s weird. Oh, interesting. Love that green!”
An installation by Joell Jones and Anne Hege at Oakland’s Fort Creativity Center reminds us to stop, look, listen and feel. “Eight Emotions” is a dreamily lit series of fabric banners, each accompanied by a soundscape. You travel through the gallery wearing headphones connected to a CD player; the carefully timed musical pieces, each about a minute long, are designed to open the mind and heart to the expressive painting.
Visual artist Jones brings her former life as a clinical psychologist to bear on the banners, defining shapes with broad, tough brush strokes and washes of color that may be sweetly iridescent or aggressive. The music, a mixture of electronic instrumentation and found sounds, makes you feel like moving, adding another dimension.
In Hege’s minute long compositions, a dominant motif layers itself over found sounds that the ear strains to follow. Together, they create a synesthesia that can soothe or rile.
The more you look, the more you hear. The more you listen, the more you see. The more you see, the more you feel.
The banners were digitally printed from a series of more than 200 gouaches Jones produced over several years. She found recurring images that eventually resolved into eight emotional states. Magnifying the images magnifies the feeling, she says, as does the sound.
“A larger image, you can’t deny,” Jones says. “It viscerally involves your whole body. And sound is such a powerful way of affecting and bringing out emotions.”
Says Hege: “I begin with a sense of the environment and, from there, building a melodic motif. For example, for the Hope banner, Joell wanted a sense of openness. So I chose the ocean, because it has a sense of expanse and distance to it. Whereas Locked In is a kind of fiery sound. In the tape, you hear actually bottles in a bottling factory being knocked around. It gave a sense of the compactness of these molecular things bouncing against each other.”
Fort Creativity Center is one of several studios in a longtime artists’ building near Adeline and Market streets in Oakland. In the former industrial space, Jones creates sculpture, drawing and painting, hosting “creative intermingling” events with fellow artist Jeanne Jabbour, who also facilitates an ongoing drawing class at the studio, while Jan Camp will teach classes in desktop solutions for creative businesses.
You can see more of these artists’ work on their Web sites:
