by Delaney Tufts, Contributing Writer
Seniors Emma Nesselroade, Michelle Dunn and Ashley Lacheta will have their art on display as part of the senior artist series. They were chosen to showcase their hard work and talent and have each explored their own creative process. “We are all born with the innate desire to create art,” Dunn said. “It is in this process that we find ourselves becoming closer to the Creator. We are able to explore ourselves through our creativity and the creative process.”
Dunn’s exhibit is on display upstairs in the Bistro gallery. Although work began just a few short months ago, she has been planning this exhibit for the past few years. “I have been thinking of my senior show, and the ideas have changed many times over the years,” Dunn said. “It has slowly developed into my current show. I don’t believe I would have liked to do anything different. This show is a representation of myself and my time here at Asbury.”
Dunn has studied art therapy during her time at Asbury, and her exhibit takes a glimpse at the combination of art and therapy. Her medium of choice is acrylic on canvas. She has chosen to display art created by fellow students along with her own. “My show combines both my personal work and the work of my fellow students with whom I have conducted mock art therapy sessions,” Dunn said. Her artwork is focused on Abstract Expressionism, which was a movement aimed at subjective and emotional expression with emphasis on the creative act.
Nesselroade’s exhibit is featured in Kinlaw Library. She has been thinking about her senior exhibit since freshman year but didn’t begin working on it until recently. The exhibit conveys the human body and what it reveals to us about God. According to Nesselroade, her paintings were done with “watercolor on canvas or pastel and watercolor on layered tracing paper glued together, varnished and squished between two pieces of Plexi glass.” She hopes that students are challenged to see the human body differently and understand the theological significance of it. “I was inspired by growing up as a doctor’s daughter and by the temple in the Old Testament, especially the Holy of Holies,” Nesselroade said. From start to finish, the paintings and the exhibit installation took about two months.
Lacheta’s exhibit is also on display upstairs in a Bistro. Her planning process took about seven months total. “It was a long process, but I needed every minute of it,” she said. She began thinking about what she wanted to do last August, unsure of what to do at that time. She chose film photography as her medium and sought to display the relationship between nature and man. “My goal is not necessarily to highlight any excessive destruction that the two can forge over one another,” Lacheta said. “I want to share the allure, the elegance, the fascination, the loveliness and the natural beauty that I see in the union of natural and man-made aspects of our world.” She found her inspiration from a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which opened her mind to see how humanity “has altered the earth to be more inhabitable, more comfortable.” Lacheta hopes students will find the same meditative place and beauty she found in her pieces.
Each exhibit is on display from March 2-24. A reception will be held for each artist at the exhibit on March 9 from 4-6 p.m.