SAD Mag caught up with Saida Saetgar to talk about her latest piece showcased in this year’s Vancouver Mural Festival (VMF) installment of Winter Arts and to reflect on her journey as an artist working in digital mediums.

Before venturing out as a freelance 3D artist and motion designer, Saetgar spent her free time doing illustration and graphic design while studying finance at SFU. She points out with some hindsight a re-emerging theme throughout her career, which has been that of “hoping for one thing and then accidentally discovering another.”

Since first encountering a dark, dreary sci-fi style of 3D art that was dominant only a few years ago, Saetgar has been carving out space for more lush ideations of futurity in her work. Creating ecosystems of alien-like entities inspired by deep-sea creatures and incorporating references to Catholic and Orthodox symbolism, as well as hyper-specific styles such as vaporware, her pieces are lively and immersive. It’s easy to see why her visuals would lend so well to Dua Lipa’s celestially upbeat track “Love is Religion”. If her latest piece crafted in augmented reality (AR) were set to a soundtrack, it would be to something like an endlessly looped guided meditation.

The implementation of AR in lieu of physical murals for this year’s VMF Winter Arts proved more than a logistical solution to the rainy climate. For the participating artists, the festival offered an opportunity to explore AR technology while having access to technical support. Still, as a first-timer delving into the medium, Saetgar candidly mentions some of the setbacks encountered along the way: “I just went so big [in terms of ideas], and then I realized ok I can’t go that big, let me do something simple. There are lots of resources on how to create things like filters for social media, but in the context of art there are still very limited resources on how to do AR”. The current resurgence of interest in the technology invites artists to probe the medium’s capabilities and limitations. Saetgar seems hopeful about the rapidly changing panorama.

Journey into a Dreamland by Saida Saetgar / Vancouver Mural Festival (VMF) Winter Arts

Her piece for the festival titled “Journey into a Dreamland” seems to navigate these capability restrictions while crafting a contemplative experience seamlessly. Imagined as an invitation to escape, Saetgar explains her interest in the otherworldly structure emerging from a palette of soft pink, purple, and blue tones to invoke “a portal in a utopian dreamscape, an idyllic heaven into which love, light, and hope are the binding threads.”

As we all grapple with ongoing isolation, the consolatory freedom of reaching out to something beyond our immediate physical is well embedded into the fabric of AR and other interactive, computer-generated interfaces. There's an inherent paradox ruminating quietly; in Saetgar’s piece, for example, a solitary cyborgian-nonentity floating above a vast and unearthly scenery certainly signals an all familiar and foreboding sense of alienation. Yet, there's an unabashed optimism found within.

In a landscape of increased digitality and with art disciplines absorbing the impact of the pandemic in vastly different ways, Saetgar offers some insight on the particular challenge she faces: “Film is not as easily implementable right now, so a lot of film projects are coming to motion designers, that’s partially the reason why there is a boom right now. I’ve had to learn how to prioritize the projects that I want to take on and also learn boundaries and how to say no if there’s a project that doesn’t benefit my work as an artist or fit in with my goals”.

With a significant increase of projects coming her way and seemingly infinite avenues in old, new and resurfacing technologies alike, the artist’s primary goal at the moment is to continue to expand the rich worlds in her artwork through a honing in of her visual language. A language that already proves to be a vibrantly idiosyncratic vision through a feminine lens looking into the future and offers the viewer an opportunity to reflect, escape, and reimagine.

You can learn more about Saida Saetgar on her website and Instagram.

SAD Online

Portals to Futurity: An Interview with artist Saida Saetgar