Take this year's theme: "Elements." You can take that to be a reference to the weather. It can mean one's natural environment, as in, "She was in her element." In mathematics, an element is one member of a set; in science, it's one of the fundamental substances (remember the Periodic Table?). It's even the hot part of a stove.

To Dave Ringenberg, pondering the piece he wanted to create for this year's Community Art Project, the word suggested the elements, or various parts, that make up the town of Chapel Hill.

Nic Beery, on the other hand, gave the word a bit of a twist and came up with something surprisingly refreshing.

The Community Art Project, now in its fifth year, invites the people who live, work and play in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area to create and submit original works of art, which will be exhibited in venues throughout the community.

The project is open to everybody; participants don't have to be professional artists, or even consider themselves artists at all. It's just an invitation for everyone to express some creativity, said Steve Wright, public art coordinator for the Chapel Hill Public Arts Commission.

The Chapel Hill Public Arts Commission and the Carrboro Arts Committee are co-sponsoring the project.

The opening reception for the project will be Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. at Open Eye Cafe, 101 S. Greensboro Street in Carrboro.

Ringenburg's piece is called, appropriately enough, "Elements of Chapel Hill." It's a mosaic depicting the Bell Tower on the UNC campus, and if you look closely you'll see that it's made of thousands -- 15,600 to be exact -- of tiny photographs of scenes throughout Chapel Hill and the university campus.

Ringenburg took some 835 individual photos and used a computer program to crop, enhance and reproduce the images, and to arrange them to produce the image.

Submission guidelines called for pieces to be no larger than 24 inches wide by 36 inches tall. Ringberg wanted to use every inch he could get, so he looked for a vertical Chapel Hill icon as a subject.

"With all the pictures I was taking, when I was looking at it, I thought, 'That really feels right,'" Ringenburg said. "I just thought it had a nice coloration. Composition-wise, it looked good."

He and his wife are new to the area; they moved here from Cincinnati last spring. Newly retired and looking for a new home, they came to Chapel Hill because they wanted "to enjoy the beauty of the area" and they couldn't think of a better place for art, music and culture, Ringenberg said.

"I was basically looking at Chapel Hill through fresh eyes," he said. "As soon as I heard about the 'Elements' Community Art Project, I decided you could look at the elements like stones, the air, the sky, or you can look at it as the parts as a whole."

"I did a lot of photography in the past. I wanted to create a piece that was a little more experimental," he said.

Nic Beery -- a producer and editor who runs a company called Beery Media and who coordinates the Century Center Cinema program every month -- has participated in the Community Art Project for the last three years.

He loves jazz, and he couldn't help noticing a certain similarity between this year's theme and the name of his favorite musician: Ella Fitzgerald.

Hence his submission: "Ella-Mints" -- a concert-poster portrait of Fitzgerald superimposed on an Altoids mint box.

"She's smooth," Beery said. "She goes down easy, like mints, like Altoids," Beery said.

The piece was inspired, he said, by a poster of Fitzgerald that hangs above his video monitor in his downtown Carrboro office. The poster is from a jazz club show Fitzgerald performed in 1948. He said the club was a small, intimate setting, and the image was captured by legendary jazz photographer Herman Leonard.

Beery has entered work in the Community Art Project every year since his family moved here three years ago, he said.

"I think it's a very cool thing," he said. "And I think it's very beneficial to the community to see what their friends and neighbors can do. They may not be an artist by trade, but they can do something like this where they know their work will be seen and hung. It might be an impetus to get people interested in the arts."

This year's Community Art Project has received about 230 submissions.

The Chapel Hill Public Arts Commission has a committee of 15 to 16 volunteers who choose the theme each year.

"They generally try to choose a theme that's fairly broad, accessible from all angles and appeals to children and adults and artists," Wright said. "[A theme] that conjures up an image immediately."

The purpose of the project is to "enhance and enliven the community through art, but also to get all sorts of people making art," he said. Related to that idea is the project's practice of displaying the works in a variety of sites that may not normally consider themselves arts venues.

For example, this year, artwork will be hung in nine different venues, including coffee shops, libraries, the PTA Thrift Shop and the Robert and Pearl Seymour Senior Center.

The pieces will stay up until May 28.

Wright has coordinated the project for the past three years. He said he's amazed every year at the volume, variety and creativity of the submissions, and at the enthusiasm the project sparks in the community.

"It's sort of like volunteering; there's no monetary gain," he said. "You wish art was always this way: Everybody would join together and take time to make something, and to put it out there to share with the community."