2,000 pounds of solid ice filled the Sarah Spurgeon Art Gallery in Randall Hall for the Department of Art and Design Faculty Exhibition on Nov. 3. The gallery features the recent work of full-time and part-time faculty members, graduate teaching assistants and retired faculty members from CWU. 

One piece that will be shown is “Thaw” created by the Art and Design Department Chair, Gregg Schlanger.

“It’s [the ice] been placed in a pool and it’s going to gradually fall over the course of the exhibit,” Gallery Director Heather Horn Johnson said.

Horn Johnson said this show is a good opportunity for students who are either currently taking or may want to take an art and design class to see what new ideas their professors are working on. 

Schlanger said he has never done anything like “Thaw” before. 

“I use ice because I think it’s very seductive of a material,” Schlanger said. “I had no idea that it was going to glow blue like glacier under these lights until yesterday …  It was a happy surprise.”

Schlanger said he hopes the piece is simple enough to allow people to bring themselves to it and think what they want to think about it. S Moss, a CWU alum, said that “Thaw” gives them feelings of disconnect between body and mind.

“My show [solo exhibition at CWU] was focused on things of being trans, seeing my body and my gender as a shifting identity and I totally see that here,” Moss said. “I don’t think photos would do this piece justice because I think the movement of everything is so important. Nothing’s going up towards the houses, everything’s coming down.”

Charlie Tadlock, a graduate assistant at CWU, had a piece in the exhibition called “An Hour and a Half Home,” which is a time-lapse of him driving back home to the west side of Washington. 

Tadlock said he just let a sense of unconsciousness come over him with the time-lapsed images of himself. 

“There’s points where I’m dancing along to the music in the car and there’s a point where I stop and get out and stretch and sort of letting that kind of monotony and banality of the road come through,” Tadlock said.

Tadlock said with this piece he hopes people will consider their own presence as they go through landscapes. 

“I would like it if people thought about the next time they’re out driving, ‘What are these sort of iconic symbols? How are they sort of fading in and out of this sense of sort of highway hypnosis?’” Tadlock said. 

Shane Johnson, a faculty member, had two pieces in the show: “Gallery of the Gamer: Overwatch Tournament” and “Gallery of the Gamer: World of Warcraft.” 

“These two pieces were a part of a job that I did for Activision Blizzard Media,” Johnson said. “They contracted with a marketing agency that I work with [and] they wanted to create an online virtual gallery featuring different artworks or adaptations of artworks that reflected different aspects of gaming and gamer culture.”

Van Parsons, a junior studying art at CWU, said their favorite piece was “Gallery of the Gamer: Overwatch Tournament.”

“That is just like, the peak epitome of like, ‘Oh my God, I want to do that,’” Parsons said. “It’s such a great thing to see it in a gallery setting. You don’t usually see it.”

The Department of Art and Design Faculty Exhibition will be in the Sarah Spurgeon Art Gallery until Dec. 3. The gallery is free and open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Saturdays from 1-5 p.m.