A-STATE SENIOR EXHIBITIONS

THE MOTION OF EMOTION / PINK HAZE - 2026 SPRING SENIOR EXHIBITION

The spring Senior Exhibition features six students graduating from the Department of Art and Design at Arkansas State University. They include Emily Bowman, Nathan Campbell, Savannah Campbell, Daisey Munguia, Lake Summers, and Sharline Vanpelt.

Emily Bowman, Working as a digital photographer, I am primarily interested in photographing personal areas, exploring how people can make an impact on a physical space. Documenting places that I am familiar with and have strong connections to allows me to examine the memories that I have in those spaces and the ways that they continue to affect me. I also aim to achieve a level of connection with my audience through the photos themselves, so that people might see themselves or their loved ones in my work. It is important that I photograph people and spaces as they exist. Documentary photography best serves my purpose because it allows me to capture the world as I see it, completely authentically. I am drawn towards documenting specific areas that evoke a sense of familiarity, such as nightstands, desks, or kitchen counters. These spaces can be deeply intimate, allowing the viewer to understand specific information about someone, but these subjects are also universal. I am interested in how people can recognize themselves in these photos and how these subjects echo their own lives through their spaces. My overall goal with the work is to create thought-provoking pieces that cause people to feel a deeper connection within themselves and their surroundings.

Born and raised in Jonesboro, Arkansas, Emily Bowman is a documentary photographer working towards her BFA in Studio Art at Arkansas State University. Her work explores memories and the nuances in the relationships between people and their spaces, with a specific focus on domestic and rural environments.

Nathan Campbell, Transportation has been a big influence on my life. Growing up I enjoy toy trains. At School I enjoyed the small field trips on the bus with my friends. Traveling back and forth from school and visiting my grandparents, railway tracks were parallel to the road we traveled on. Looking out I got to see the size of the locomotives and learning how important they were solidifying my joy of transportation of goods and people. Recently, I have gathered an interest in printmaking. I am to use my art to show my enthusiasm for travel. I want to go into history and connection. To show what some consider mundane of travel and turn it into an art form.

Nathan Campbell was born in 2003 in Jonesboro, Arkansas. He is pursuing an emphasis in Printmaking at Arkansas State University. His work explores forms of transportation using it as the subject of his art.

Daisey Munguia, My art acts as a means of self-exploration in which I share parts of my culture and personal perspectives. While I find joy in the traditional acts of building or carving, I am interested in the use of materials that would be considered untraditional. Inspired by their ability to parallel my traditional upbringing as a Latin American, an upbringing not considered traditional through an American lens. Incorporating mixed media, childlike imagery, and warm colors into my work, I explore themes that reflect my experience as a Hispanic woman living in America. I am using symbols that bring me comfort from my childhood. Creating a juxtaposition between darker contexts and bright, comforting imagery.

Daisy Munguia-Bonilla is an artist based in Jonesboro, Arkansas. She will be receiving her BFA in Studio Art at Arkansas State University 2026. Munguia-Bonilla has participated in the FIRE Conference directed by the Metal Museum in Memphis during May of 2025 and returned this fall as a volunteer during their annual Repair Days fundraiser.

Savannah Campbell, With portraits of fire and lumen prints, I depict my personal connection between fire and divinity through the lens of my spiritual practice. I utilize stark colors that evoke a sense of sacredness, belonging, and a wildness that is prevalent in my practice as a rurally located pagan. In my craft there is an effort to work intuitively, to let the fire speak for itself. My own existence intertwines with the ideas of nature and the ancient gods people used to so readily worship. My work does ultimately go beyond personal connection, though, and expands into the wild nature of belief and how one may shape that for others to see, opening a door just enough to let someone else peek inside through the art of photography. Fire is a vessel to connect to the divine, no matter who you are, a sacred thing with its own energy. It is more than just a destructive force. Flames have an energy that one can secure themselves to the spiritual through.

Savannah Campbell is a photographer born and raised in the Arkansas Delta region. Traveling a lot as a child sparked her curiosity for capturing memories, beliefs, and thoughts in photographs that explore both her surroundings and connection to spirituality. She is currently attending university at Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, AR, where she is expected to graduate in the spring of 2026 with her Bachelor of Fine Arts Studio degree.

Lake Summers, Queerness is not always visible, by its very nature it’s something that cannot be confined to neat categories. Not everyone has the privilege, or the desire, to transition. Not everyone is born skinny with a conventionally masculine or feminine build. Some are born with large breasts, wide hips, or broad shoulders; features that cannot be easily changed and should not determine whether someone is desirable, accepted, or considered fully a man, a woman, or neither. Queerness is not always obvious and cannot be made to fit neatly in a box. My goal is to highlight western queer culture in a society where it's still seen as a political statement to love who you love and be who you are. In my artistic practice, I explore the intricacies of self-expression, gender, queer identity, sexuality, and desirability. By challenging contemporary beauty standards, the subjects of my work often represent non-conforming people. Incorporating comics and pop culture, I use bold lines to illustrate characters’ features in a graphic approach. I depict the figures through position and staging within their space. Emphasizing loose brushstrokes and stylized shapes as seen in Every Body Lounges. I want to convey the same appeal with focuses from different walks of life. I look towards queerness and the history of my community for inspiration. How they dressed or flagged others to add layers to my work. People often present differently under the same label, coming from distinct backgrounds or embodying varied expressions of identity. Commonly, the media portrays us in one of few ways. The over the top stereotype for humor, under a lens of fetishization for their own sexual gratification, or in a digestible heteronormative way to claim allyship while stripping away everything that makes someone ‘culturally queer.’ With all the progress we've made as a society, there is still a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way to be queer, trans especially; the right body, the right look, and overall, the need to be palatable according to society's standards. Falling short in any way earns you scrutiny and accusations of faking it. Never understanding that someone’s identity isn’t something so cut and dry. My art aims to be authentic to myself while offering representation to my community. Often portraying what I wished to have seen growing up. People existing casually in their natural bodies with the color palette of pride flags being the main signifier to their gender.

Lake Summers is a painter born in the South. Growing up queer in predominantly conservative areas, this heavily impacted both their life and subsequently their work. This led them to explore different identities and ways of expression in their art. Working primarily in acrylic, they incorporate illustrative qualities derived from graphic works, such as harsh black outlines and stylized features. Summers currently attends a BFA program in painting at Arkansas State University and is expected to graduate in May 2026.

Sharline Vanpelt, Conceptually, my work engages with themes of phenomenology. I create with a bias shaped by my lived experience. I would argue that every artist does, as we are all drawn to certain forms or concepts due to personal bias. Phenomenology broadly concerns itself with lived experience and perception, examining how meaning is formed through one’s direct engagement with the world. For me, it encompasses the study of the self and the accumulation of lived experiences that shape personal identity. As I am alive and still experiencing, my work continues to grow and change in reflection of that process. I regurgitate visual input I have collected through my forms, color palettes, and materials. My jewel toned color palette is influenced by popular cartoons from the early 2000s, such as Winx Club and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. My fondness for tulle stems from overexposure to it through childhood pageantry. These references instill a sense of nostalgia within my work and inform both my material and visual language. This body of work reflects these notions through a diversity of media, including paintings, castings, and fiber art. I use my work to open conversations surrounding the social constructs embedded within materials. For example, my use of aluminum to depict draped fabric creates a juxtaposition between content and material. Pairing the femininity of fabric, a historically women-dominated craft, with the masculinity of metal, a historically male-dominated craft.This interest in juxtaposition continues within my paintings, which hang in limbo between high and low art. Painting, a material conceived as prestigious and untouchable greets the viewer from the floor. The viewer is invited to flip through a large scale book and physically engage with painted images. This versatile body of work mirrors the exploratory nature of my practice, reflecting an insatiable need to continue learning, experiencing, and living.

Sharline Vanpelt’s artistic practice is based in material exploration that primarily yields three-dimensional pieces. Residing in the Arkansas Delta Region, the artist comes from rice fields and a lineage of farmhands. Her works reflect her hard upbringing in many ways and do not shy away from laborious techniques or mediums such as metal. Rural isolation has had a lasting effect on the artist, which is apparent in the escapist themes prevalent throughout her work. During her time studying for her BFA at Arkansas State University, Vanpelt, alongside two of her peers, won the annual research symposium Create@State at the undergraduate level. She also received a juror’s award at Gathering at the Kitchen Table, an exhibition at the Bradbury Art Museum.