ORANGE PARK – The mall is the harbinger of crummy bank statements, home to cheap Chinese food, the Salvation Army Santa’s deafening donation bells, and last weekend, student art.

More than 1,500 pieces of student artwork descended on the Orange Park Mall last weekend for the Clay County School District’s 28th annual student art show.

Twenty-three schools representing students from elementary all the way to high school offered their budding artists a chance to have their work viewed by passersby May 13-15.

Judges awarded ribbons based on various criteria for the participating media. Each category had its own awards for best in show, teacher’s pick and honorable mentions.

Placed in front of high traffic areas such as Belk and J.C. Penney, the art show drew the attention of nearly everyone who passed by it, be they Avant-garde artists or regular Joes.

This was the first year students were allowed to come take their work down while the art show was in progress, after the judging of course. However, some students were able to garner a small fan base and sell some of their work, sometimes to the surprise of the artists themselves.

“I noticed one of my students this year, my old students,” said Allyson Patton, the art show coordinator and six-year veteran art teacher at Wilkinson Elementary School. “They’ve received ribbons and some veteran students coming back and wanting to volunteer and still help out with art and really wanting to help reach all the students with expressing themselves.”

Patton only gets to see her students once a week, however in that small amount of time, she tries to instill a genuine adoration of art and fluidity of medium usage that, she hopes, will follow them as they continue with their education.

Undoubtedly, most of the students were giddy about the prospect of others scratching their chins at their work. For Magaleate Kostelnik, however, her focus didn’t revolve around the work hanging in the mall last weekend. Her focus was on the artwork that wasn’t.

Kostelnik, a senior at Fleming Island High School, won this year’s District 3 Congressional Art Competition hosted by U.S. Rep. Ted Yoho(R-3). Her photography piece, is a self-portrait with an overlay of trees that inspired the piece’s name, Tillandsia Usneoides, the scientific name for Spanish Moss.

“My whole theme was exploring women characteristics, and what women actually look underneath, instead of looking on the outside,” Kostelnik said. “It’s a play on going back to the natural body and the natural world, instead of nowadays going back to the modern. So it’s like a play on feminism and a play on nature.”

The piece was made for her AP concentration, and features digitally enhanced features, color correction, and various other touch ups that Kostelnik believed were necessary to give the picture the weight she wanted it to have.

“I’ve never been a regular portrait kind of person,” Kostelnik said. “It sounds bad but I like the darkness my photos have, the more meaning it has, the better. I don’t like ‘here’s a photo of a girl in a nice pretty dress’ I like my photos to have more meaning to them. I usually just fall into it and see what happens.”

Kostelnik plans to minor in art photography in college, however her real passion is marine biology. She hopes to one day merge the two using underwater photography equipment to shed light on troubled marine ecosystems.

“My last major project was a beach cleanup,” Kostelnik said. “We went out with some friends. There was five of us. It was a beach known for a bunch of trash – there were cigarette butts out there, and I saw a leatherback sea turtle that was dead and had garbage bags coming out of its mouth.”

Students that participated in last weekend’s art show, whether they came home with a ribbon or not, went home with the knowledge that their work had exposure. That kind of exposure encourages students to express themselves even more through art, Patton said.

“In my position it’s just developing the love for art at a young age, that’s what I find important in art,” Patton said. “Instilling that at a young age so when they go to high school they get to find the mediums they love.”