Alyson Napier’s takes inspiration for her artwork from the Keysville, Va., tobacco and cattle farm where she grew up. In one of her black-and-white photographs, which will be on display April 11 through May 10 as part of Sweet Briar College’s annual Senior Art Show, vines overtake the side of a barn.

This toned silver gelatin print by Alyson Napier will be on display in the Senior Art Show.“The subject is nature taking over the manmade world, reclaiming itself,” Napier said of her photographs. “There are a lot of buildings with vines popping out of the buildings [and] some images of poison ivy or poison oak climbing up a chimney.”

The Senior Art Show, which opens with an artists’ reception at 5 p.m. Friday, April 11, will feature work by Napier, Melissa Hardison and Lauren Burke. Admission is free and the public is invited.

In addition to her 15-by-15-inch photographs, Napier also will display charcoal drawings and relief prints. In her drawings, which are mostly landscapes, Napier said she tried to “capture the emotional quality of nature as well as the aesthetic — what you feel when you see something in nature, not just what you see.”

This oil painting, one of several portraits by Melissa Hardison, also will be exhibited.Hardison, who hails from Tallahassee, Fla., will exhibit 20 or more large- and small-scale oil paintings of real and imaginary figures. For several of the pieces, Sweet Briar students posed as models.

A studio art and creative writing major, Hardison was recently accepted into Laguna College of Art & Design in Laguna Beach, Calif., but has yet to make a final decision about graduate school.

The show also will include charcoal drawings and multimedia pieces by Lauren Burke of Gaithersburg, Md.

“The work I will be presenting … is a compilation of multimedia works influenced by movements’ creation of space,” Burke wrote in an e-mail. “In the charcoal series, the subjects are juxtaposed against an oblique background.

“The outcome of this juxtaposition involves subject and task-making elements the focus of environment. The emphasis is the subject in a reality of itself. The films are literal depictions of movement confined in space and movement occupying the visual concept of space.”

For more information, contact Rebecca Massie Lane, art galleries director, at 381-6248 or rmlane@sbc.edu.

– By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer