A new mixed-media exhibition is on display in the San Jacinto College South Campus art gallery, showcasing three artists whose work brings together multiple art forms, including assemblage, painting, and photography.

The Ways They Are features pieces from Carris Adams, Sebastien Boncy, and Matt Manalo. While the art is diverse in presentation, the show’s central theme centers on the idea of home and “explores how the quality and character of our environment directly affects our identities,” according to the exhibition statement.

Manalo said “home” commonly means a specific location, but his work addresses the gulf that occurs when individuals physically occupy one space but find themselves spiritually and mentally in another.

“So, it’s like that whole emptiness,” he said. “I want to talk about that, as well.”

One of the exhibition’s centerpieces is Manalo’s over four-foot-tall sculpture, “Body as a Colonized Vessel,” that underscores the show’s central theme with topics like home, scarcity, and abundance. The base of the sculpture contains scattered dirt gathered from around the South Campus.

Gallery assistant Emily Thomas said the staff worked hard to gather materials for the piece, and in her opinion, the final presentation “says a lot.”

“I really like the way it fills the space,” she said. “And I love the color and the contrast, and I just think that all of these pieces work really nicely together.”

While Manalo expresses himself through sculpture, Adams uses paint and layers of materials to reflect the language of the environment she grew up in through three installation pieces: “Untitled (LIQ OR),” “Untitled (BE*UT*),” and “Untitled (C**SH).”

Boncy, on the other hand, is presenting a single installation piece, a collection of photographs titled There Is No Mountain.

“Boncy is interested in ‘the world of things,’” the exhibition statement says, “not just for their histories, or their meanings, but often just in the way that they are.”

Art and Design Professor Bradly Brown, the gallery’s director, said the different showpieces complement each other well because each one resonates with meaning.

“One of the words we’ve been talking about through this exhibition is just intent and the intention of the art and the artists,” Brown said. “There is not a piece that is put into the show that doesn’t have some sort of reasoning behind it.”

The Ways They Are will be on display until March 27 in the art gallery (Room 143) of the Flickinger Fine Arts Center (S15) on the South Campus.