As part of the BFA DMA group exhibition, I created Soothing Sorrow, an animation that visualizes frustration, anger, stress, exhaustion, and defeat during my college career and more importantly, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Converge Confidence, my intended title of the work, was to be a hybrid sculpture and digital projection mapping installation. Using the pedestal for one of my sculpture works of a styrofoam head with found objects, I would be able to project animations of confident poses and movements. The sculpture would juxtapose the animations by evoking the hardships and emotions. Due to the pandemic, however, projection mapping and a physical installation was not going to be possible. To transition to a digital installation, I focused on what I was comfortable with which was making a 3D animation.

I took inspiration from previous renders and animations and thought about what I could do in the digital realm that I couldn’t in the physical. I wanted to simulate the idea of projection mapping by compositing an overlaid animation on a pedestal, which results in an animation inside of an animation. The scenes of the “projection” are clips of objects penetrating certain limbs as well as flowers beginning to bloom. I strayed away from focusing solely on the body because I wanted it to be the focal point at the end of the whole animation; the limbs interact with these objects to be reassembled in the finale.

Iterating and reconfiguring the piece to become fully digital and that lives in a digital space was not only stressful, which is also reflected in the piece, but it also pushed me to think about how art can live in digital spaces and not just art galleries. The BFA exhibition, hosted by newart.city, was a fun learning experience and sets a precedent for what future galleries can look like. Having the 3D models exist inside the exhibition alongside the animation is symbolic of how the overall piece embraces the inevitable emotions that rise from unprecedented circumstances, but also emerging from the depths and looking forward to the future’s opportunities with strength and positivity.