According to an artist’s statement:
“Salt & Fury” is an evocative body of work that delves into the profound connection between environmental forces and psychological states, utilizing the dynamic coastline as a powerful metaphor for internal experiences of anger, grief, and transformation. This collection comprises oil paintings of fractured shorelines, envisioned not as traditional landscapes but as “impact zones” where human emotion confronts the boundaries of language, alongside abstract color works that surrender to pure sensation, embodying affect in raw, visceral form.

Gusler presented on her artwork at a sabbatical spotlight and opening reception on Tuesday, Oct. 28.

View a photo gallery of the reception below.

Gusler holds an MFA in painting and drawing. At EMU, she shares her love of immersion into these practices with her students.

To see more of her art, visit or follow her on Instagram at .

Exhibited in the Margaret Martin Gehman Gallery during Homecoming and Family Weekend, Oct. 13-15, 2017, “10x10x100” featured five artists and their 100 new works, each measuring 10 by 10 inches.

At the opening reception, Centennial Committee chair Louise Hostetter ‘79 welcomed two honored guests. Professor Emerita was the university’s first female graduate to earn a doctorate — in art education in 1962. was the college’s first graduate with an art degree, and became an advocate for the arts at EMU and for Christian art worldwide. The campus features two of her installations: Guns into Plowshares, from Washington D.C., and Love Essence, near the seminary.

In her thanks to the committee for including the arts in the weekend, curator Ashley Sauder Miller ‘03 noted how artists embody EMU’s “Serving, Leading, Transforming” Centennial theme.

“The artist is a servant, silently showing up,” she said. “We lead through vision.” Artists are transformed by creating works that transform others, too, she said, by helping them “see things in a different way.”

Read more about each artist .

Unique media

The artists — Barbara Gautcher, Rachel Herr ‘04, Zachary Nafziger ‘01, and Melinda Steffy ‘03, along with Miller— each selected a specific focus to express in a unique medium.

When creating her abstract collage paintings for “Through the Window,” Gautcher, an art teacher for 32 years at EMS and EMU, thought of the past century of people who, while “studying, writing, praying and daydreaming,” looked through windows on campus for “a view into the landscape, a vicarious peek at people passing by, and a vision into the future.”

Herr’s contribution began with a photograph of a female friend who she thought embodies “today’s deeply Mennonite, modern woman.” Herr then reproduced parts of that photograph onto 96 of her 100 squares as a reflection on change in women’s roles in the Mennonite church. (She invited other photographers to fill remaining four squares.)

In the process of creating the project, she realized that women from across the spectrum of Mennonite diversity are all “trying to figure out what we’ll do in the same way as our ancestors, and what we will do differently. We’re each making our way.”

Miller used mixed media — from paints to graphite to embroidery floss to donated materials from EMU’s facilities management, and more — to image chairs on campus or shown in historic photos.

In his Tiffany-style stained-glass panels housed in four-sided wooden frames, Nafziger expressed “ideas of tradition, history, location, connections to each other and Earth,” he said — “the light and love of culture and humanity that can be found as the basis for EMU’s core values and ethics.”

He decided to make his works into lamps because, he said, “Mennonites love things to have purpose.”

Steffy’s 100 paintings of color reinterpretations of “Praise God from whom” — widely known as the “Mennonite anthem,” or simply by its number in the old (606) or new hymnal (118) — portrayed a “four-part worldview” that “embraces diversity, listens to and draws out marginalized voices, and acknowledges that no single part holds all the answers.”

Four-part church singing is less about being perfect than about being present and participating, Steffy said, and following the opening ceremony, she led exhibit attendees gathered around her paintings in singing the hymn.

Responses

Steffy’s work — specifically her inclusion of imperfection — left at least one visitor “in awe.”  Valerie Lane, who with her husband Darren was on campus visiting their daughter Michaela, a first-year student in the visual and communication arts program, said finding EMU was a “God thing.” The arts education at EMU, she said, is broader than would be offered at a traditional art school.

Augsburger said that each artist in the exhibit “is different from the others. Each one is very creative. They bring a lot of energy.”

The exhibit was “a rich display of depth of personalities and expressions of gratitude for the heritage and experiences received here at EMU,” said Evon Bergey ‘79, a member of the board of trustees. Herr’s work, she noted, points out “the impact that strong women have had on the university and on the larger human experience.”

Twenty percent of sales from the exhibit were donated to the EMU arts program.

Lila Marks describes Hawaii’s landscapes as “effortlessly beautiful,” but when the ��ݮ���� photography major traveled there this summer for her senior project, she had something else on her mind, too: Hawaii’s homelessness rate, the highest of any state.

The resulting exhibit, called “The Ignored,” features 75 frescos showing Hawaii’s beauty but also portraits and candid portrayals of homeless people and images of and from the Boat Harbor, an organized community of “houseless” people led by a matriarch. The frescos range in size from 5×5” to 24×36” and are created by transferring a print made on plastic onto a wooden surface.

The show runs Monday-Friday, Oct. 2-6 in the Margaret Martin Gehman Gallery, open during Common Ground Coffeehouse hours (7:30 a.m.–4 p.m. and 8 p.m. – midnight on weekdays) or by appointment by calling (540) 432-4360. An artist’s talk and reception with light refreshments will take place at 6 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 6.

The senior show, required for , is one culmination of Marks’ education at EMU, a place she came to as an older transfer student with a goal of becoming a more skilled photographer.

“Lila goes after photography like someone who got to the party late and wants to make sure she gets it all,” Professor said. “What will make her a great photographic storyteller is that she cares about the woman dying of cancer, or the one challenged by a debilitating disease, or by the pain of being homeless in a paradise. I hope she never finds the easy answer.”

A serendipitous leap to EMU

Marks said that becoming a photographer and studying at EMU started on a whim. She’d been studying global affairs at another university, but didn’t feel passionate about her coursework. She dropped out, and used her student loan money to buy a camera.

“It was for no reason,” she said. “I had never really taken photos. I just thought I should do it.” She started taking a lot of pictures, “filling up memory card after memory card,” learning, getting better. Eventually, at age 25 and living in Harrisonburg, she realized that she couldn’t imagine her life without photography in some capacity.

She was taking classes at a nearby community college, “for no reason other than I felt like I should be in school,” when a professor told her that EMU’s Holsopple “was a ‘crazy genius,’ and I should apply for EMU. I was like, ‘EMU? I don’t know.’ I’m not Mennonite. I didn’t even know then what being Mennonite was.”

Though she said it was a “leap, and probably serendipitous,” Marks surprised herself by both applying and being accepted into EMU. But it wasn’t until she was on a cross-cultural trip led by Holsopple to Lithuania that she finally decided: “OK, I can do EMU.”

Holsopple, she said, has been “a huge mentor to both my personal life and my photographic life. I don’t know if I 100 percent believe in fate, but only good things have come from being at EMU.”

The cliche of Hawaii — and its crisis

It’s expected to see homeless people in big cities, Marks said. She grew up in Washington D.C., and was always fascinated with homeless people: She’d go around the city with a bag of fast food, just talking to them and “hearing their stories.”

For this project, though, Marks was drawn to Hawaii, where for most island visitors homelessness is just a disregarded subtext overshadowed by natural beauty.

“We all have these cliche’d views of what Hawaii is and what it should be,” Marks said, when in fact the state is facing “a crisis that doesn’t get talked about nearly as much as it deserves.”

Ignored

The exhibit’s title “The Ignored” has two meanings. First, it reflects the reality that society often ignores homeless people.

“We’d rather not see them or deal with them,” Marks said.

But there was another reason, too, that she gave the exhibit its name: while working on the project, she often felt ignored. Whether it was due to homeless people’s sense of self-preservation, or her awareness that approaching someone on the streets of Honolulu could cause discomfort or suspicion, or her own sense of vulnerability as “a small female, unarmed, with a nice camera,” the difficulty of meeting and connecting with homeless people at some times left Marks discouraged.

“It was an immense challenge even to make initial eye contact,” she said, so she developed a plan: smoking cigarettes “kind of close to groups, in hopes that I would capture someone’s attention.”

“They actually worked,” she said. “They were my biggest tool in doing street photography.”

But successfully starting a conversation didn’t always mean that things would go as planned. While Marks wanted to talk about homelessness more broadly, many people she met instead were focused otherwise, on day-to-day realities or maybe remembering “glory days.”

“It was definitely not what I was expecting,” she said. “I had these really big conceptions going in that people would want to talk to me and, you know, share their experiences, share their pain, get their story out, but it wasn’t exactly like that. What I bumped into a lot was mental illness and drug addiction, people that didn’t want to talk, people that didn’t want their photo taken, and people that didn’t really want to talk about the issue. I had to be really open to what was offered.”

No easy answers

Marks had also thought she would come away from her trip with “some sort of culmination, or a solution, and idea of what I felt like should be done” about homelessness — but that didn’t happen.

“When I got back I just had bits and pieces of everything, sound bites. I never felt like there was ever any uniformity even in the struggle of being homeless, any concrete thread. Every single person’s different,” she said.

Marks hopes to return to Hawaii to “dig deeper. A month is not a very long time when you’re trying to do something with the enormity of homelessness or mental illness or addiction,” she said. “A month was a really, really short amount of time.”

For now, Marks plans to donate 10 percent of the profit from the show to the Boat Harbor community in Waianae, which she said is a “large and unified community” that is fighting for their right to stay on public land.

Westfall’s statement for the installation, titled “Searching the Unseen,” includes the following description: “organic steel sculptures tangling like roots or unseen bursts of energy, and plastic and silicone curling like membranous surfaces of microscopic images speak to the phenomena of repeating systems found in the macro to the micro. The light pulsing with the sounds from cosmic background radiation, heartbeats in utero, and waves of resonating sound from percussion instruments, hopefully will stir a response on a visceral level.”

Westfall earned an MFA from the University of New Mexico and a BFA from James Madison University. She is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work often explores the complex relationship between memories, genetics, cycles in nature and the larger system of culture that inform identity.

Westfall has exhibited her work in Virginia, New Mexico, Georgia, Washington D.C., and Massachusetts.

From the artist’s statement

“Searching the Unseen” is an installation that explores the search for understanding which often leads to complexity and ambiguity rather that an expected clarity. Westfall borrows from recognizable images in both the microcosm and macrocosm, looking at the concept of dark matter and energy to microscopic views of cells such as neurons within our own bodies to speak to the search and ever expanding perspective science has provided. Often intriguing yet disquieting, knowledge gained continues to bring focus to our lack of understanding.

Specifically, the theories regarding dark matter and energy prompt unexpected questions.  If we have focused most of human history on the visible 5% of known space, missing the other 95% of darkness beyond our notice, what truths have we been blinded to by the blazing matter filling our visual frame? Additionally, as scientists map neural connections in simple organisms as a way to understand behaviors in a more complex brain, I began to wonder how these scientific advancements will challenge our definition of self, identity, and what it means to be human.

The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 7:30 a.m.-4 p.m.