Contact: Sammy McDavid
Five Mississippi State students are having their individual artistic creations presented to area and national audiences.
George M. "Trace" Furniss of Clarksdale and Susan M. McCann of Walnut Grove soon will be exhibiting their graduate projects at local galleries. Both are candidates for master's degrees in the art department's electronic visualization program.
At the same time, three members of a departmental class in photography have been notified that images they created will be included in the 2003 edition of Best of College Photography Annual. Selections submitted by senior art majors Melvin D. Hamilton of Columbus and Sean M. Hufnagel of Little Rock, Ark., along with junior human sciences/interior design major Jesse I. Walp of Tylertown, were among more than 20,000 submitted for national judging.
The 23rd annual College Photography Contest is sponsored by Photographer's Forum, an award-winning quarterly publication established in 1977 to provide communication and publication experiences for emerging professionals in the United States and Canada.
Furniss, an MSU fine arts graduate, will have his master's thesis, titled "Progressions," on exhibit March 28-April 4 at the art department's McComas Hall Gallery. An opening reception for his work, which incorporates digital video imagery to study the manipulation of motion, takes place 7-9 p.m. March 29.
McCann, a painting and sculpture graduate of Belhaven College in Jackson, will have her thesis featured 7-9 p.m. March 21 at the Starving Artist Union Gallery, 404 U.S. Highway West in Starkville. The opening reception for "Sheltered Fragments" will begin with a short discussion by the artist of her project, a video installed inside a shed that focuses on childhood memories and their relationship to intimate space.
The photographic entries of Hamilton, Hufnagel and Walp are among the top 7 percent of images that were selected by a three-juror panel to be featured in the 2003 edition of the hardbound photography annual.
Since 1980, the entries of Mississippi State students consistently have been selected for display in the Best of College Photography, which will be released later this year by Serin Communication of Santa Barbara, Calif.
Founded in 1968, the university's art department offers bachelor's degrees in graphic design and fine art, and a master of fine art in electronic visualization/animation and multimedia. A part of the College of Arts and Sciences, it is home to the state's largest university art studio program.