Each school year during finals week, Southern’s School of Visual Art and Design (SVAD) honors student creativity by holding SHOW, an event in which the best class projects from the year are put on display. SVAD recently released video of SHOW 2014 to the public as means of sharing this high-quality film, graphic design, animation, and fine art work with a broader audience.

While this year marks the first time SHOW material has been collected and posted online, the on-campus event is fairly young as well.

“In 2006, a former animation professor and I were discussing how we missed a tradition from our time together at graduate school,” said Zach Gray, associate professor in SVAD and SHOW producer. “At the end of each term, students from the animation program would get together in the auditorium and watch each other’s projects from the quarter. We thought it would be fun to do the same thing here!”

The two professors began to gather materials for a similar presentation and were able to curate about 30 minutes of content of animation before deciding to invite the film program to be a part of the project as well. The following year, the other arts disciplines participated and the audience continued to grow, as well. Traditionally, the two-hour event on campus has drawn more than 350 attendees comprised of students, friends, family, and community members.

SHOW represents a massive amount of student work. According to Gray, a design on screen for two seconds may have taken up to 20 hours to complete, and a two-minute animated short video could easily have taken 2,000 hours to create. But it’s not simply the time invested that makes SHOW special. It’s the pride in being selected to participate.

Suzanne Ocsai, 2014 SVAD graduate, was given the opportunity to include her graphic design projects at this year’s event.

“The feeling you get when something you’ve made is on display is powerful,” Ocsai said. “SHOW is one of the biggest highlights during the year for art students; it was such an honor.”

Art Sabbath School Class
Much like SVAD, the local church community is also making efforts to invest in art students and reward their enthusiasm for creativity. A “Relational Christianity” Sabbath School class at the Collegedale Church of Seventh-day Adventists brings together both students and church members alike to discuss how Christians might better engage secular society in meaningful conversations that have the potential to lead to conversions. This class, which meets in the Hulsey Wellness Center on campus, has covered topics such as creation, evolution, and paleontology in an open environment.

For this coming quarter, discussions will center on the integration of faith and art. SVAD professors are working with Sam Chetty, pastor and director of the class, to lead out in various presentations and discussions throughout the quarter. For reference material, participants are encouraged to use the new book “Manifest: Our Call to Faithful Creativity,” which is produced by Signs Publishing (a Seventh-day Adventist company in Australia) and includes chapters by Southern faculty and alumni.

“The class is designed to equip those within the church and student body for engagement with those outside of our belief system,” Chetty said. “We will be asking the question: Why does the church make art secondary when God is a creative being?”

For more information about the Relational Christianity class, email Pastor Chetty.