A senior capstone exhibition featuring the works of four UNC Pembroke art students will be on display at the AD Gallery beginning Thursday, October 27.
'Relate' will be on display through November 10. A reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. on Friday, October 28. The gallery is located at Locklear Hall.
The featured student artists are Sarah Reynolds, Melanie Scrudder, Justin "Zeke" Hagan and Kailey Thompson. These artists use various mediums to express the many different relations people have with themselves, others, and society.
Reynolds focuses on the bold use of color and organic lines to create art that speaks to her experiences and the emotional turmoil surrounding them. In recent works, she has explored the use of abstraction and botanicals to create expressive paintings.
Her inspirations can be sourced from artists such as Rebecca Kate and Marinka Plovanic. The series prepared for the exhibition is titled Growth Amongst Chaos, about the growth she is experiencing as an artist and as a person amongst the chaos of being a full-time student, daughter, friend, and partner.
Scrudder's paintings and drawings deeply relate to emotional ties with family members and friends, with an acknowledgment of her past experiences and circumstances. Her work has important overarching themes connected to memory, place, abuse, women's issues, and positivity and self-reliance.
Her experience of loneliness when not feeling part of a secure family and the deep trauma of abusive familial relationships has attuned her to social and emotional cues within human interactions. This has influenced her body of work in terms of her figurative subject matter, focusing on projected emotions.
With the pieces prepared for her capstone, Scrudder's goal is to speak to the audience's subconscious and encourage strength and healing in the face of misfortune.
Hagan creates art to do more than merely promote the viewer's visual stimulation. Art, for Hagan, is not just profoundly personal but also serves as the window to his soul. There lies the residence of the thousands of words he could never manage to speak. Schizophrenia is a prominent issue he addresses in his work and in pieces prepared for this exhibition. He emphasizes how a positive relationship with yourself can combat these mental disorders. To him, art may be one of the purest forms of expression, a method by which one can be free.
Thompson uses art to express inner turmoil and the prolonged trauma of being a woman. She can take hold of her grievances through art, through her expressive linework and haphazardly placed texture. As a common attribute of pieces throughout her portfolio and those for her capstone, anthropomorphism serves as a symbol of the artist's abstraction of her mind and body as a byproduct of these grievances. With the assumption that viewers may hold similar experiences, she creates art to unify the inner self of her own, of viewers, and any others with such regrettable experiences.