The University of Alabama art and art history departments opened their fall graduate student studio art exhibition in the beginning of October. The exhibit, called “You Can’t Hold Water,” is located in Sella-Granata Art Gallery in Woods Hall and will close Nov. 2.

For graduate student Andy Pruett, “You Can’t Hold Water” denotes that an artist’s work must “hold water” to be considered viable.

“It is the necessity to be able to articulate your work with a solid discussion beyond the strictly formal qualities of it,” Pruett said.

The title was decided after the group of artists met to collaborate on possible names for the exhibit.

“We all made suggestions and voted for our favorites,” graduate student Mark Barry said. “‘You Can’t Hold Water’ finished with the most votes, so it became the show title.”

For James Davis, the title represents a literal depiction of his work.

“I work with functional material,” he said. “In a very literal sense, technically, all my work can hold water.”

Davis, Pruett and Barry will each be displaying pieces in the exhibit.

Davis is a student in his fourth semester, whose areas are ceramics and sculpture. His inspiration for his art comes from the crude and socially unacceptable.

“A lot of my focus comes from dirty jokes,” Davis said. “I present them as stories and use imagery to tell my story.”

Davis’ piece in the exhibit is “If She Smokes She Pokes: Memories from Prom.” Davis drew inspiration from his grandfather who was a trucker, his imagination and just walking down the street.

Barry is in his third semester of his MFA with a focus on painting and sculpture. His work, titled “Heavyweight,” is an acrylic painting that examines and enhances the physicality of stretched canvas.

“It asks the viewer to engage the painting in an nontraditional way – forcing them to see the physicality of the painting itself as a part of the work, rather than a two dimensional picture plane,” he said.

Barry wants the physical painting to be a part of the work as much as the picture he has painted.

Pruett, a Birmingham photographer and graduate student, will also be displaying his work, “Untitled.”

His work is a digital pigment transfer on a board, which he explained as a photograph on a transparency attached to a board in an aesthetically pleasing way.

“The imagery I work with is rural towns, but also time passing and how time affects things,” he said. “There is a lot of nostalgia in my work.”

Pruett also uses his own heritage and story to create ideas and inspiration for his works.

“My family is native to the state of Alabama,” he said. “I spent a lot of time as a child in smaller towns, and my grandmother lived in an older house. I really love the old established homes that housed generations of people, the structure of the house, the land and the culture around it.”

Although this show is usually for incoming first-year students, the exhibit is available to all studio art graduate students because the incoming class was so small.

“The three first-year students actually organized the space and came up with the design of the show,” Davis said. “They did a good job overall and put in some really hard work.”