The Birke Art Gallery was packed Wednesday evening as Marshall University’s School of Arts and Media hosted its opening reception of the 31st Annual Juried Student Exhibition.

With a juried exhibition, the jurors do not know who the artists are, they only get the artwork to look at. The jurors also get to look at the physical pieces, not digital files.

“The jurors said the two things they [art students] brought out the most were simply body and physicality — texture, touch and things that represent the body in different ways,” Director Sandra Reed said.

Third place was David Noel with his piece, “USDA Prime,” second place was Kaitlin Blatt with her piece, “Albert,” and first place was Cory Bond with his “The Virgin in Style” series, “Dissolve,” “Drip” and “Dust.”

Cory Bond is a sophomore visual arts major with an emphasis in painting and ceramics. Bond explained his experience of winning first place as “taking a bite of a hot food, and you know it’s going to burn, but you don’t know how bad — prepared, but very surprising.” He said he spent lots of nights awake on the paintings and spent an estimated combined total of 90 hours on all three pieces.

“My inspiration was classical renaissance art work,” Bond said. “I wanted to make a classical piece in my own way. I feel like I represented it in a form in shapes and ways that you can look at it and be like ‘this could be somewhere one day,’ and it would not be taken anything less than classical. I just wanted to create something that could pinpoint what a sentence meant, but could completely be on a different spectrum.”

Bond had some words of encouragement for those whose work did not make it into the exhibition.

“Know your strong points and don’t let anyone tell you different,” Bond said. “Be yourself, commit to it, put in the work and give it as much love and respect as you would yourself if it was your own skin. Know that someone is going to appreciate it because someone would appreciate you.”

Honorable mentions went to Bryan Pennington for his piece, “Eye,” and Tyler Woodward for his piece, “Decay.” Robert Greer received an Award of Merit for his piece, “This is the body of Christ, specifically the eyes, amen.”

Kelsie Tyson received an Award of Distinction for her piece, “Airing Out Our Dirty Laundry.”

Juror Chris Hatten’s choice was Noveed Hasan’s piece, “Uni-directional,” and Paula Clendenin’s juror’s choice was Chelsey Adkins’ piece, “When We Grow.”

The exhibition will be on display through April 7 in the Birke Art Gallery.

Hannah Swartz can be contacted at [email protected].