The duality of the human experience will soon be on display in the student art gallery of the Kamerick Art Building.

The Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) program will be showcasing the works of two very different artists, Mariah “Bubble Gum” Coffey, a BFA major in performance art and art history, and Spencer Jensen, a BFA major in painting. Both are graduating seniors who are showing their artwork focusing on revelry and loss, respectively. The exhibition will run from today at 7 p.m. through Dec. 17.

“We’ve been doing BFA exhibitions for quite a while, but we haven’t really made it a BFA Group exhibition until about a dozen years ago,” said Darrell Taylor, the gallery director and caretaker of the UNI Permanent Art Collection. “We’ve always provided a platform for students to show their work.”

The BFA exhibit occurs every semester for the last week of the semester and can show a range of two to seven graduating seniors’ work. Before the opening, the seniors are able to choose their best work, work with professors to write a proposal and are given three days to set up everything in their own space in the gallery.

“A lot of my work, my live performances or model performances, where people are dressed up in pieces I have made, are really my foundation I really got into,” Coffey said.

“My second year, I got into print making and layering. I kind of took little bits and developed an idea about my obsessions and clumped them into this exhibit. The titles of my show are things like ‘Bubblegum Party’ or ‘Bring your own Bubblegum,’ where it feels like party and I’m the hostess of this show. It’s an entire party of its own.”

Coffey went on to discuss some of her inspiration for her exhibit.

“I’m a very prop performer where I get inspired by an object or material and I get an idea from that and watch the way things move and get into that,” Coffey said. “I really like to look at 90’s cartoon shows or obstacle course shows. I’m really inspired by things like parties and fun.”

The other half of the gallery showcase, Jensen’s exhibit, is representative of the polar opposite of the human experience — heartbreak.

“Catharsis has been my inspiration for this exhibition. My mother passed four years ago this December at an early age due to alcoholism,” Jensen said. “She died four years ago in a bathtub due to a heart attack or heart failure. Her heart was stopped for 20 minutes. The paramedics revived her with drugs […]

After several days of watching her get worse I pulled the cord. My worst nightmare came true. I saw it all – that memory will be with me as long as I live. Pulling the cord was the hardest action I made in my life.”

Jensen said he chose watercolor because he felt it could give him an edge on the body of work in his exhibition.

“I gave it a chance, I rolled the dice. What is recorded on the canvas is me dealing with my raw emotions about my mother. You will see memories that me and my mother shared, artifacts she enjoyed most in life, metaphors, my emotions.”

The exhibit brought back good memories of art hanging in the museums of Europe for Jayda Baumhover, a sophomore communication studies major.

Caitlin Mary Margarett Brainard, a senior also majoring in the BFA’s performance and art history program, shares Baumhover’s excitement for the gallery.

“The BFA exhibition opening is always interesting because you see the accumulation of what your friends have been working towards during their time here,” Brainard said. “During class you get vignettes of what they’re working on, but the BFA is this miraculous thing where you get to see the full picture of how they express themselves.”