The Visual Arts Center’s opened its newest exhibition Monday, “These Same Waters,” which features drawings and painting with collages of magazine clippings consisting mostly of human and animal body parts.

“The imagery is recollection heavy, brimming with the impossible to forget,” said Mullins, in his artist statement. “In a sense, I’m attempting to draw my mind.”

Mullins said he is mainly influenced by the culture and events surrounding him, growing up in a working-class area, attending the university, popular culture from the late 1970s to the 1990s, music videos and Dutch art.

The art was created to discuss what masculinity is and what it is means, confronting subjects such as memory, class and the expectations that the world places on men. 

“There’s a lot of rural American male imagery here,” Mullins said. “I think the term ‘working class’ has really taken some lumps right now, so I’m a little reluctant about it, but it is very much that.”

Several art students, such as Breanne Thompson, experienced Mullins’ art at the reception.

“He captures so many different infinitesimal moments,” Thompson said. “The way he gathers those images together seem very train-of-thought and very much how your mind and memory would work.”

The different interpretations that the art could conjure was something noted by art major Halo Kent.

“Some may see beauty and happiness, and others may see darkness and sadness and confusion,” Kent said.

Mullins said he hopes students, art or other majors, enjoy and understand the art and its style, calling it figurative and accessible due to images and themes that he calls familiar.

“One of the reasons to keep making figurative work is that it is accessible and people can enter into it,” Mullins said.

“These Same Waters” will close October 27.

Landon Mitchell can be reached at [email protected].