It was a mild summer day on the Snake River when Squeak Meisel paddled a bear-shaped raft across the placid waters, wrestling with the existential issues of life and death that plague us all.

Naturally, Meisel videotaped the event, sped up the footage, and installed it alongside his work in the Fine Arts Faculty Exhibition now on display in the WSU Museum of Art Gallery.

The exhibit opens today through Sept. 26 and features work by artists Sena Clara Creston, Dennis DeHart, Tim Doebler, Joe Hedges, Kevin Haas, David Herbold, Michael Holloman, Zachary Kolden, Jamin Kuhn, Pamela Lee, Jiemei Lin, Squeak Meisel, Hiromi Okumura, Lo Palmer, Alma Rocha, Sam Ryan and Reza Safavi.

An opening reception from 6 – 8 p.m. Sept. 3 will include a performance by Fine Arts Associate Professor and bear raft rider Squeak Meisel.

The bi-annual exhibit is an opportunity to highlight some of the art culture available in Pullman, Meisel said.

“We all show nationally and internationally,” he said. “As professors we aren’t just teachers, we practice as well.”

Fine Arts Instructor Hiromi Okumura spent her summer travelling to Portugal, the Netherlands, Colorado, and more in search of inspiration. Her travels often influence her work as much as they influence her as a person, Okumura said.

When she paints, she’ll start a piece, leave it, and then come back to it after a month to look at it with fresh eyes. Taking a break allows her see what needs to be changed to create the most active, visually stimulating work, she said.

“My intention is, looking at the painting, you feel the need to move closer,” she said.

Okumura penciled in notes throughout her work directing the audience through the installation. She tries to capture the physicality and movement of a medium in her work.

“It’s about the outer universe and at the same time the inner universe,” she said.

In this piece, Okumura also plays with the physicality of the audience, as the viewer ‘dances’ in front of the installation a camera picks up the movement and triggers different sounds to accompany it, she said. Okumura collaborated with Varelie Williams and Jenn Kirby, whom she calls her “brains outside her body” to create the movement and sound interaction.

“It’s kind of a score for the dance,” she said.

Meisel’s installation, “Table for One,” is made of 10 radios set up on a dinner table, each playing a recording of various interviews with the interviewer’s questions edited out.

“What’s great about the show is that we’re all so different,” Meisel said.

No one in the exhibit is just a ceramicist or just a photographer; everyone crosses over the artistic boundaries to create their own unique work. His personal artwork balances in between experiential improvisational art and created objects with more permanence, he said.

Sena Clara Creston, Clinical Assistant Professor at WSU Tri Cities, contributed an installation titled “Americave.” The work includes a tipi made up of 100 pounds of jeans from Good Will, EMT and safety pins.

“The installation utilizes cheap disposable manufactured materials that would be abundantly available after the fall of contemporary civilization,” Creston said.

She said she felt blue jeans represented the American ideal of freedom, “of the modern pioneer, cowboy, worker, teenager, hippy, leisure-class and freedom-seeker.” A television is placed inside the tipi where typically a fire pit would be. The television plays a hypnotic loop, hinting at the mass produced and plugged-in nature of our culture. Specifically it is an allusion to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, overall the work is a commentary on modern society usurping native culture and land, she said.

The Museum of Art Gallery is open Monday through Wednesday and Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Thursday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. The museum is free and open to the public