Students who will unveil conceptual art designs in the Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition have challenged the notion of what is art and what is not.

These eight students have spent the past three years preparing for one of the most important events in their college careers, with exhibits ranging from architectural designs to those that explore sexuality and cultural identity.

The thesis exhibition is the final requirement for graduate students who will have their work displayed in the Fine Arts gallery on April 22. The Master of Fine Arts program trains students to be competitive in the art world and gives them the qualifications necessary to become art instructors.

“Art is completed when it is seen,” said Mark Johnson, an art professor and the gallery director at SF State. “We can see that art is changing. It used to be that people would make a painting or take a photograph and hang it on the wall. Most of what you will see in the thesis exhibition is the complete opposite.”

The work on display will range from painting and printmaking to digital media and moving images. The MFA degree is the reward for all of the hard work these students have dedicated to their field and the highest degree obtainable.

Johnson, 52, teaches a class entitled Exhibition Design. This class of 30 students is responsible for everything in the gallery from arranging the layout of the space for the event to lettering and lighting. The Exhibition Design class puts on two shows each semester and is already preparing a show for another group of artists in the fall.

“Limerence,” a film/installation by Robbyn Leonard, 36, attempts to make an analogy between the intense emotional rollercoaster that is love and the idea of making art. Limerence is a term used to define an irrational biochemical condition characterized by intrusive obsessive thinking and acute longing for reciprocation of love.

Leonard, an MFA graduate student, has been working on her piece for the past year as part of a category of art called new practices. New practices is for artists who do not have one traditional focus, and allows them to combine two or more areas of emphasis like photography and digital media for example.

“I think creative energy and sexual energy are connected,” said Leonard. “I think of my work as a way to explore things that I have not actually discovered about myself yet.

Marina Shtereberg’s piece entitled “Improbable Architecture” is an imaginary space that resembles a city. The piece deals with the way individuals experience different environments both psychologically and spatially. It also deals with how individuals shape the external world and how the external world in turn affects them.

Shterberg has been working on “Improbable Architecture” for the past six months and hopes to see her three-dimensional architectural models, which were originally proposals for actual installations ,integrated into public space.

“I am an immigrant and while working on these projects I learned that my main influence was my experience coming to this country, and the kinds of negotiations that happen between the internal and external worlds,” said Shtereberg, 25.

Shadi Yousefian, an MFA graduate student, has been working on two installations entitled “Universal Identity,” and “Examination.” Each explores the identity fragmentation that happens to people from all cultures. Yousefian said that when she moved to the United States from Iran she experienced a culture shock that made her realize how individuals can have two identities at once.

“No matter what nationality, race, culture, gender, or age, people experience a fragmentation of identity,” said Yousefian, 27. “Living in a diverse society, we take fragments of identity from other people and these fragments create a whole identity.”

The Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition will be held on April 22- May 19 at the Fine Arts Gallery located in room 238 of the Fine Arts building. For more information contact the gallery at (415) 338-6535.