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The room was filled with chatter and movement, observation and interaction with art during Thursday’s opening of a multi-media exhibit, showcasing the work of six graduating art students.

The BFA Exhibition 2012 is now open at the Myhren Gallery in the Shwayder Art Building on East Asbury Avenue.

Gallery director Dan Jacobs explained the show is a capstone project of sorts, a culmination of the artistic progress of the School of Art and Art History’s Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) students, Sarah Begnoche, Zoe Brown, Hannah Chaussee, Wangui Maina, Grace West and Faith Williams.

The exhibition showcases them as artists, allowing the students to display who they’ve become and what they’ve done as artists. With no coordinated or central theme, the exhibit is truly about the students themselves, each given the freedom to choose their own project and run with it. The exhibition is the concluding requirement of the BFA degree.

The six students in the show fill the space, many displaying more than one work of art. Many of the artists showcased a number of pieces, exploring their own underlying concept through a variety of media.

Wangui Maina’s hair-themed pieces explored the concept of self-identity through hair, expressing hair through a number of media with detailed drawings of hairstyles.

She also took hair out of its original context, creating sculptures from it and causing the viewer to see it in a new light, apart from the identity it creates when atop a head.

For Maina, the project was as much about the idea as the media she used to express it.

“Culturally, hair has evolved into something more than that [an organic part of our bodies] by becoming a symbolic part of the individual,” Maina said in her artist’s statement. “The way we view one another and the way we are classified by social status, race and culture can be affected by what kind of ‘do’ we wear.”

Maina explained her piece gives hair a new life of its own by disembodying them. Using the hair as a sculpture, or drawing, rather than on a person’s head, offers an entirely new perspective.

Sarah Begnoche’s piece, titled “You’re Too Old For This,” attracted attention with its interactive digital-coloring-book qualities.

The work displayed simple, blown-up coloring-book style images on the wall. Standing in front of it, one could move their arms or hands and the movement would be picked up by infrared light and skeleton tracking allowing one to “color” on the screen.

“I think my favorite part of the night was getting to see people interacting with my artwork and having fun with it,” said Begnoche.

Her artist statement, displayed on the wall beside her piece, explained despite the piece using “cutting edge technology,” it basically functioned as a coloring book.

Begnoche asked viewers to not only look at the piece, but to interact with and experience it. She challenged the audience through the piece’s childish and playful qualities to recognize one is never too old for a coloring book.

“I chose to make the piece because I wanted to explore the idea of childishness and how society views it as something negative, but if you add a digital interaction to something childish, it becomes interesting and new,” said Begnoche.

Begnoche said she is unsure of her exact plans after graduation, but hopes to do something involving digital illustration.

The green glow of  Zoe Brown’s instillation was also eye-grabbing. The green room infested with green plastic rats and roaches, crawling over the floor and dangling from the ceiling. They filled corners and covered tables, drawing inspiration from Sandy Skoglund’s “Fox Games” at the Denver Art Museum.

The green roaches could also be found strategically placed throughout the entire gallery, making it a truly interactive work.

A plate of red cookies sat on a table in the center of the room, the main attraction for the infestation of pests. Brown experimented with various preservatives to preserve the real chocolate chip cookies, as Skoglund did in “Fox Games.”

According to Brown, the instillation combines her interest in studio art with her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in art conservation and chemistry.

Grace West’s four individual pieces center around the concept of found objects. She said these pieces were her primary focus for the past five months, and how she decided to display her work was her biggest challenge. Her final installations took over 30 hours to complete.

“The experience was incredibly exhausting, but in the end rewarding. It was a bumpy ride getting to the end, but once I got there it was hard to believe my work paid off,” said West.

West plans to find a job in the arts or theater after graduation, but first a few weeks of hibernation are in order.

The show was well-received, and according to Jacobs, the students’ ambition and hard work produced a “truly excellent” show with a “great response” from the professors and others who attended the opening.

“I’m really proud of them,” said Craig Robb, the sculpture technician at SAAH who works closely with the students.  

In addition to the BFA show, the same evening eight BA students opened their curated show in the 023 Gallery on the bottom floor of SAAH.

Artists included Casey Mason, Hana Akal, Hannah Moskowitz, Ida Chorney, Jessica Salas, Rocio Correa, Shelby Sheppard and Sophia Vidal.

“I’m really pleased [with the show], it reflects the general trend towards the increasing quality of our BFAs and BAs,” said Jacobs. “Our program is getting stronger, and I see that reflected in the students’ work.”