What a short week it will be for the artists featured in the new campus exhibition, What A Long Night It Has Been.

The exhibition opened Monday in Gallery 214 at the Art Building. There are 26 works exhibited by 21 artists from Illinois, Indiana, New York and Pennsylvania. The show focuses on the unpleasant and uncomfortable parts of life and comes across as a contemplation of how to keep moving on when life is at its most difficult.

Show curator and third year MFA Painting student Maria Dimanshtein is among the artists exhibited.

“Most of the people in the show were my classmates,” Dimanshtein said. “But I wanted to include a couple people from other places for variety.”

Facing the entrance from the corner is a white-painted arm made of metal screen by Anna Miller; the remainder of its body is suspended on the other side of a partition.

Three monitors display animations in the gallery: a video collage of Syrian imagery by Anne Yafu, a silent black screen with dialogue comparing drowning to falling by Jason Judd and a personal tale of cultural identity by Leah Bedrosian Peterson. Shh, by William Fillmore, shows a life-sized ceramic toddler holding a butcher knife.

Photographs by Emily Franklin, Juan Fernandez and Liz Nielsen deal with issues of balance, scale and optical illusion. Oil paintings, prints and drawings, as well as mixed-media pieces, fill the gallery and give visitors plenty of food for thought.

The exhibit will be on display through Friday. Its reception will be from 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday.

“We are going to have a performance artist here; that will start at 6 p.m. and hopefully will be done by 7 p.m.,” Dimanshtein said.