Continuing with its senior capstone series, the School of Art and Design’s newest exhibition at the Visual Arts Center, “Growing Up,” shows the projects of five graduating seniors as they touch on personal issues.

With the message of expanding personal space and limits, graphic designer Sam Ball framed the word “SPACE” in pink within wooden picture frames separated by letters, with other disjointed letters blending with the blue background.

“Graphic designers and screen printers typically create flat two-dimensional pieces,” Ball said in his capstone statement. “With this work, I experimented and expanded the medium to match my message of expanding space and pushing boundaries. By splitting the image into four separate planes and placing them in a particular order, I have added volume and depth within the piece.”

Working with sculpture and sewing, Kaitlin Donnally speaks about gender equality in her work with beakers and other science equipment with floral flourishes, to highlight the past of women being only allowed to participate in science classes in order to “embroider a botanically correct flower,” as she said in her capstone statement. Her other work includes pillows that feature the female form embroidered onto them.

Donnally said she drew inspiration from a past of women not being able to take fine arts courses and make line drawings of nude models, due to thinking that it was morally corrupt, but, in what she called a contradiction, women were allowed to pose nude for line drawings. She said she made the pillows in honor of this and featured floral patterns to highlight a contradiction and show her gratitude to the female artists before her.

Kelsie Tyson used sculpture and fibers to capture herself in art form, saying that she keeps her process “loose,” and this results in the “dips and curves” of her sculptures, which are headless due to her wanting them to be relatable. She said she uses fibers as she relates them to emotions, due to fibers being “soft and sensitive.”

“My work is about body, it’s about communication, it’s about crossed lines, mis-happenings and about opportunity,” Tyson said.

Mason Hart uses his paintings to “evoke mood and elicit raw emotion from the viewer by tapping into grand emotions of the human condition rather than the details that fill the spaces between,” as Hart said in his capstone statement.

Hart’s work consists of a large fiber structure entitled “How I Feel,” as well as three paintings, Hart also made a musical composition to go with his painting “1:15AM,” which can be accessed at https://soundcloud.com/user-71913743/115am.

Blake Stephens based his work on the cultural issues he has observed within West Virginia.

Stephens said the pieces of his work are based around the West Virginia heroin epidemic, the effect the coal and chemical industries have on the state’s nature, the decline of the coal industry, hate groups and police brutality.

The exhibition opened Monday and will close Thursday.

Landon Mitchell can be contacted at [email protected].