Story and Photos by RORY MOORE Video by DANIEL LITTLE
Tiger Media Network
Fort Hays State University’s Department of Art and Design hosted an opening reception for the Biannual Art & Design Graduate Student Exhibition in the Moss-Thorns Gallery on Friday. The gallery features various works by students working towards Master of Fine Arts degrees in their respective disciplines.
“Andro… with a touch of gin” by PJ Stauffer. 
Looking at the piece entitled “Cut-Off.” 
Madeleine Stegman talks about the process of creating “Full Bloom” to a viewer. 
The Graduate Student Exhibition inside the Moss-Thorns Gallery of Art. 
Talking about and admiring “Eyes of Envy” by Erin Tichota. 
Stauffer explains his creative style to onlookers. 
Artworks by graduate students working towards their Masters of Fine Arts. 
Turning the clock on “Lost Rumination.” 
“Platform” by Dan Schluckebier. 
An acrylic owl featured in Rylie Hazelton’s “Psychosomatic.” 
“Windows to Inheritance” by Taylor Craig.
Moss-Thorns Gallery Director and Interior Design Instructor Colin Schmidtberger is proud of the talents showcased by students.
“I don’t think there’s one individual piece that stands out,” he said. “The group of them all is what makes this show unique. You’re taking mediums from all the different disciplines of the arts and putting them together. So, it’s fun seeing how they work together, and I think it all becomes its own large piece in the end.”
One of those students, Madeleine Stegman, had multiple pieces featured in the exhibition.
“I do a lot of mosaic pieces,” she said. “Full Bloom and the Scarab Box that opens and closes with glass in it are mine. The Scarab Box is cast in iron, and then I use glass fragments to mosaic the top and enamel paint. The Full Bloom piece is cast iron hummingbirds with mosaic glass pieces.”
Stegman’s pieces focus on the theme of botanical nature.
“I like to include multiple elements,” she said. “Glass and iron have been a recent study I’m working on and combining the two elements together.”
PJ Stauffer created five pieces of the exhibit, including ‘Lost Rumination,’ the interactive piece where viewers can turn the large body-like clock.
“Most of them are mixed media pieces and a couple of them are made body print collages,” he said. “The largest one took me at least 60 hours to complete from start to finish. Most of them took more than a couple months. I was working on all of them at the same time, and I have to wait for things to dry. When it comes to the black and white ones, I do multiple sessions of body prints, and before I ever make any of those collages, I have to individually tear apart all the pieces and figure out where I want to put them.”
Thematic elements of his work include dissecting oneself from an introspective stance and being vulnerable towards others without oversharing.
“I try to visually convey that struggle of wanting to talk about it but not wanting to talk about it because it alters how people feel,” Stauffer said. “There is a delicate line between oversharing so somebody understands you and completely spilling your guts out to somebody who didn’t need to hear all of that. So, trying to find that balance and communicating it is difficult.”
Stauffer, like the other graduate students, is thankful to have his work featured in the gallery, but his gratitude comes from a personal level.
“Last time there was a Graduate Student Exhibition, it was my first year and I didn’t have a lot of work while I was going through some life events,” he said. “This year, it feels like all this work is actually coming on top. This is the best I’ve felt in the past two years, so to see it all come together here and get support from my friends and hear all the kind compliments from the people I care about, it makes me feel like it was worth it to put that effort in.”
The exhibit will be featured in the Moss-Thorns Gallery from Sept. 12 to Oct. 10.