The opening reception of the second installment of art student capstone exhibitions was held Monday at the Visual Arts Center.

This week’s theme is PERCEPTION. Students Jasmine Felder, Mary Claire Odom, Tyler Woodward, Morgan Culver, Hannah Saxton and Madeline Grant presented their work, along with talks about their projects.

Works included are an interactive SMART Board, posters, a visual representation that changes with a sound board, embroidery, rebranding for a church and paintings.

“There’s essentially six different ways to hang work in this gallery space,” gallery director Melissa Yungbluth said. “I get so bored with the traditional hanging methods, so working with the students and their work was interesting. It’s the little things that people don’t necessarily think of.”

Each of the week’s themes were chosen collectively by the students in each group.

“We were all bringing in different perspectives of what we were talking about,” student Madeline Grant said. “We were trying to rebrand something, give a new image to something. Jasmine was trying to re-image the youth she works with, Mary Claire with her feminism pieces, Tyler with his visual representation, Morgan also with her feminist pieces, and bringing new ideas to what women’s work really is, and Hannah to re-imaging a church and making it fresh and new, and mine with non-representation.”

Grant’s capstone project included a poem she wrote for professor Susan Jackson who passed last year.

“Each one of my pieces grew out of some pain that I went through and I tried to create something beautiful out of that,” Grant said. “Each piece is a story, is a part of me. I like to say I’m an artist, but I’m also a business woman. I hope to sell my work. I create work for myself but at the end of the day I can’t keep it all. When I create work as painful as these, I don’t have a problem getting rid of them because there are more stories to tell.”

Next week’s exhibit will be LAST CALL, which is the third and final exhibit, and will feature work from students Alexandra Neddo, Lindsey Cheek, Leah Gore, Peyton Hebb, Myla Sullivan and Liang Wu. The projects for PERCEPTION will be up through Friday at closing of the VAC at 4 p.m., at which point the work for the next week’s group will be installed.

“It was clear to me that they truly are being educated to be citizens, not just makers,” Sandra Reed, director of the School of Art and Design, said. “Their ideas and the work is all about their way in the world, what they’ve been going through. It was an incredibly moving evening, and that was kind of my takeaway with this particular capstone group.”

Hannah Swartz can be contacted at [email protected].