Assistant Professor of Art Marcella Hackbardt believes that everything should be open to interpretation. "If something is too narrowly defined," she says, "any experience you have outside of that doesn't make sense. It makes you feel isolated."

For Hackbardt, the power of art lies very much in this spirit of openness. Her own work is a case in point. A photographer, she uses both film and digital technology to create striking images that question conventional notions. One of her projects, called "Home Fires Burning," uses giant tryptichs to explore the contradictory emotions in mother/child relationships. Another, "All Boy," was inspired by her young son's love of dance and her concern about society's stereotypes involving gender and dancing. She has made a series of portraits that question "the presumption of distance between grace and toughness, frailty and strength, clumsiness and poise."

Hackbardt believes that the visual realm "has a big impact on how we grow, how we foster an identity." Her classes focus not only on photography per se but also on the nature of visual culture and on photography's place in the world. She has been consistently impressed by her students, who produce work that is "emotional, provocative, humorous, smart, and visually compelling." Hackbardt has organized a number of student shows and says that, each time, she feels the same enthusiasm and excitement that she gets from mounting exhibits of her own work.

It's crucial, she feels, for students to immerse themselves in the process of creating their own art. Art-making is an "intellectual and emotional search," she says, in which students can "investigate their definition of self, take risks, and stake out their beliefs."

Students, indeed, can share in the capacity of art to reach out, embracing and including, "so that we can make sense of our predicament," says Hackbardt, "rewrite the rules of society, and open up possibilities instead of closing them."