COLOR GAME

The psychological effects of color have been studied by scientists since the middle ages. Avicenna (980-1037) was first to discuss chromotherapy “which is claimed to be able to use light in the form of color to balance “energy” lacking from a person’s body, whether it be on physical, emotional, spiritual, or mental levels.” (wiki). In the book 3Color: The Secret Influence author Fehrman, Kenneth R. and Cherie Fehrman state that: “Colors have been stereotyped by the public when it comes to emotions ...colors do not contain any inherent emotional triggers. Rather, it is more likely that our changing moods and emotions caused by our own physiological and psychological makeup at the moment we interact with color to create preferences and associations at the moment we interact with color to create preferences and associations that we then link to the color-emotion response itself” Hoping to go further to comparing reading words to reading images, I made the work Color Games.

I used freshwater and saltwater of different densities to create two different layers in a clear container. And by mixing dyes of different colors in the container, I created several mysterious colorful views. Each image was shot with a 4X5 large format camera and scanned to yield a digital image. I then cropped the digital images into a circular shape, suggesting the aperture of the lens and of human vision. And I added a square border on the images, representative of the editing process of the visual media. Square is the perfect quadrangle that can be encapsulated in a circle. I also used this shape to imply the replacement of the circle by the square in media. Themost interesting part is that I am trying to use the confliction of word-emotion response and color-emotion response to give my viewer two contradicting feelings. For example, I titled Cloudy on one piece of work, which has a blue sky-like color on top and a green grass-like color on bottom. I titled it Cloudy because the image in the square emphasizes a more cloud-like shape. Green and Blue are commonly associated with calm and peaceful feelings, but “cloudy” is normally associated with anxiety and foreboding. I expect that when my viewers already look at the images they will have a color-response, and then when they look at the title they will have a word-response, the conflicting feeling will lead them to interpret their original emotion differently.