Brianna Jarvis is a senior graphic design major from Princeton, West Virginia who has artwork in the senior capstone exhibit at the Marshall University Visual Arts Center.

Jarvis knew she wanted to come to Marshall ever since sixth grade when her middle school band came to watch the high school band competitions at Marshall University and she watched the movie “We Are Marshall” with her cousin.

“I was sold after the competition and I watched the movie with a cousin who went and graduated from Marshall,” Jarvis said. “I was like, ‘Okay this is what I’m doing. This is my life now.’”

She grew away from the idea of Marshall in high school, but came back to it.

“My senior year in band at my senior competition, I got to watch the Marching Thunder perform, which I hadn’t gotten to do because we are one of the last bands,” Jarvis said. “I had this moment, sitting beside the Shewey building, like ‘this is what I’m going to do, I’m going to march with the Marching Thunder and it’s going to be great.’ Not long after that, I put in my application and got my acceptance letter on Valentine’s Day.”

Upon coming to Marshall, she became more involved with campus life. During her freshman and sophomore year, she was a part of hall council, the art department and is in the American Institute of Graphic Artists.

“I come from a family of artists,” Jarvis said. “My little brother is starting to get into illustration, my older sister is a painter, my dad is a first sergeant in the army and his first MOS was in illustration. Then all of his siblings and his mom are artsy, so I feel like it all just came into me.”

Her capstone is split into three pieces. The main piece is 100 4×6 pieces. It features 99 framed and one unframed piece. The symbols represent her undergraduate year.

“I used small frames symbolically to represent accomplishment, so everything that is in a frame is something that I have done or something that I’m involved in,” Jarvis said. “The final piece, the last piece, is entitled graduation and it’s not framed because I haven’t done it yet.”

Her work is like what surrealist painters do, as they would reference each other in their paintings. She began to question how would her contemporaries reference her and her artwork when they would talk about her? Some of them are symbols that represent her and other symbols are very specific, so that if someone saw them, then they would know it was her.

“Some of them are kind of silly and some serious ones,” Jarvis said. “So, there are some darker ones and some more serious tones, but I also have it with a little bit of humor and up lighting. Overall, a lot of colors are really bright, so you don’t see a lot for the darkness or seriousness unless you have read the caption or unless you ask about the backstory on it.”

Jarvis graduates in December and plans to go to Orlando to do the Disney program in February and freelance for one of her professor’s companies on the side. This will be her first time moving to a permanent residence outside of the state.

“I feel like I can make an impact no matter where I go,” Jarvis said. “I’ll definitely miss the people that I’ve made an impact with here and I’ll miss the communities here. I know I can make my own communities and friends no matter where I go, and I get to make new communities for myself and be involved in other preexisting communities.”

Brianna Jarvis’s work can be seen at the Charles W. and Norma C. Carroll Gallery in the Visual Arts Center in Pullman Square. The gallery hours are Monday through Friday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Krislyn Holden can be contacted at [email protected].