Student Joey Bechard, 19, works on an art installation in the Pence Gallery on the COCC campus. “A theme of installation art is that it’s unpredictable,” said instructor Bill Cravis. “It’s not really complete until the audience shows up.”

On Monday morning, the Central Oregon Community College campus was dark and quiet during the Veterans Day holiday.

Pence Gallery was a hive of activity by comparison. Inside, William “Bill” Cravis and three students enrolled in Art 292, the new art installation class Cravis began teaching this fall, were hard at work using twine, cardboard, metal and other materials to complete a room-sized, interactive art installation.

“It’s a small, elite group,” Cravis said of the art students, who are exploring new territory together. “It’s the first time this class has ever run, so it’s like the Apollo moon landing.”

Their mission: finishing the project in time for Thursday’s opening (see “If you go”).

Since the start of the fall term, Pence Gallery has served as classroom, studio and workspace for Joey Bechard, Steve Putnam and Marvin Wright. Not present on Monday was classmate Wesley Noone, although Bechard’s mother, a psychology major at the school, was on hand.

The gallery has seen a lot of student and faculty shows come and go over the years, but this reporter can’t recall ever having seen a stepped portal entryway into the space, nor strands of alternating twine stretched wall-to-wall.

The multiple, flared strands overhead wouldn’t look out of place on the set of a Spider-Man flick.

“As an installation, it’s going to offer people the chance to walk through the space, and there will be sound and other stuff going on,” explained Cravis, noting that Wright, who has a background in electronics, is constructing floor panels that will generate sound when stepped on.

“A theme of installation art is that it’s unpredictable. It’s not really complete until the audience shows up,” Cravis said. “Once people find it, I think they’re going to want to step on it, but we don’t really have any idea right now what their engagement will be like.”

It’s also been a lesson in group teamwork for the artists, who have had to work together in deciding how to best use the space. As of GO! Magazine’s visit, lighting was a consideration the class had yet to work out.

Asked if there’s any one thing the group wants visitors who move through the experiential piece to come away with, Putnam answered, “I think that’s going to be interpreted by the individual’s experience.”

“There’s a lot of layers” to the project, added Cravis, who earned his Master of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006.

Cravis, who taught at several Midwestern universities before joining COCC in the fall of 2012, noted that some students on campus have yet to learn what installation art entails. He expects the class to draw more art students in future terms.

“One of the main goals is for the students to come to some understanding of installation art on their own individual terms. One of the sort of standard goals of an installation is to subvert people’s experience of a gallery,” he said.

At 7 p.m. Thursday, Cravis will give a talk, “Installation Art in the 21st Century,” in the adjacent Pinckney Center for the Arts. The event is free and open to the public. The exhibit will be open through Nov. 30.

“This is a shift from the kind of art that is kind of a passive experience of people just taking things in with their eyes,” Cravis said. “In this case, people will move through the space and actually experience it physically. So it’s an experiment, for sure, as far as this campus goes.”