emotions

I use my art practice to express the dualities, issues, questions, feelings and conflicts of a bi-national, bi-culture, and bi-language woman identity - pain, belonging, struggles, cultural loss, self-esteem, acceptance, and inclusion. My practice transports the audience into the experience of being in my world - emotionally and physically - by utilizing Painting, Installation, Sculpture, and Photography. This is portrayed by using elements such as body language, facial expressions, objects, shadows, and nature. My use of iconography is important to represent both the Mexican and American cultures, inspired by the symbolic metaphors of Frida Kahlo. My depiction of dualities is influenced by Cindy Sherman and Ana Mendieta. The colors used in the work reference the national flags, culture and emotions. The materials, such as tissue paper and paper mache, interpret the Mexican handicraft and piñatas, and chicken wire and wire fences relates to the barbed wire and fence of the U.S. and Mexico border. In the U.S., some of these issues are shared between the Chicanx, Latinx, immigrants, women, and minority communities. My work, as well as this paper, decolonizes art and is made to represent the people that resonate with it.

Emotions and their causes are difficult to define, as are the boundaries of what makes an illustration different from a work of craft or fine art. Regardless of medium, a shared image that interprets the everyday and serves a communicative function can be considered an illustration. By reproducing and placing embroidered work in non-traditional spaces, needlework can be viewed as a medium for communication and not simply a traditional craft technique. While tracing the importance of embroidery to my personal artistic practice and the historical importance of embroidery to the everyday lives of women around the world, I will argue that embroidered work has a place within the field of illustration. Using humor, illustrated products, and cathartic making to confront difficult subject matter, I will demonstrate how I and other contemporary illustrators are using a deeply personal perspective to connect with and question the world around us. My thesis project, Cry If You Want To, is an embroidery kit for the frequent cryer. Customizable embroidery patterns and instructional materials teach users to hand embroider images and phrases on a handkerchief that will let those around them know whether to tell a joke, call 911, or leave them the hell alone.

This thesis work is about music visualization, which aims to extract the emotional spectrum and vitality engrained in the musical score in the manner of data visualization. The priority of its goal is to arouse an intellectual and emotional response and to inspire a beauty, a wonder or a magnificence rather than communication. It challenges to expand the scale of the field of data visualization and moves it out into broader and wilder place where I use that expanded scale as an opportunity to try a fact that data visualization really can function as a spectacle. This visualization project emphasizes on the investigation of action of musical sound, simultaneously aesthetic and scientific. It is a way of gaining direct access to invisible forces operating in everyday world around us. This idea is achieved by manipulation of sound wave, light and photographic film. Playing with scale and dimension, ephemeral material and tactility, and shifting relationship between objects, this project frames the shifting visibilities of invisible occurrence of musical sound travel. To bring in natural science for visualization does not aim to establish a new discipline, but to open up and render more permeable the existing scientific disciplines, to develop visualization more rapidly and contemporarily. Besides, it provides a new visual evidence.