Even the pleasant smell of caffeine and pastries wafting through the air isn’t enough to distract customers from the latest gallery of artwork lining the walls of Jackson Avenue Coffee for the month of October.

The works of various artists quite literally pop out from their frames, which are part of the art too.

Wooden horns, miniature horses, metal wire and even a jewelry box were all used as building materials.

Artist Joanna Key layered a straw reef with plastic, furry mice to illustrate how ludicrous the fear of mice really is.

“I think it’s funny that human’s, these giant creatures, are so afraid of such tiny critters,” Key said while pointing to her work in the midst of customers who stared at her curiously and her art curiously.

Another one of her popular pieces is a spider web frame she made out of metal wire, pieces of wood, and sprinkled with spiders on the top.

Key researched how spiders make their webs to make sure she built something as interesting and believable as the ones found in nature.

Dave Hunter, another one of the artists the gallery plays host to, said he has been making these types of pictures—bridging a gap between two-dimensional and three-dimensional art—for the past two years.

The process is known as assemblage, and in it artists craft images, with most of the leaning towards garish, haunting scenes.

“This (type of art) has become my latest obsession,” Hunter said.

Hunter said assemblage lends itself to many different branches of art that he enjoys, like painting, model making and fabrication.

One of his projects is a wooden box with an angel and a skeleton perched at the very top.

Dangling from the hooks on the wall were small demon faces stuck to paintbrushes.

Hunter said people worry about his state of mind when they approach him and question the artwork hanging in the coffee house.

“I’m putting my fears right out there. I’m nuts and I’m happy with it,” Horton said.

Horton said the artwork heightens the intensity of human fears so much that the works lose their power and are seen as exaggerations.

A mental health counselor, Hunter said humans sometime take themselves too seriously and need to learn how to laugh at their own fears.

Key mainly designs collages but said the three-dimensional side of assemblage is better simulating fear.

Some of the artwork was made out of a collection of antlers; others were strictly made of wood.

At the end of the gallery hang the works of Karenlee Spencer, the special events organizer for the office of admission.

Unlike most of the other works in the coffee shop, which have some structure to them, Spencer scattered materials in no particular fashion.

“A lot of the things there have kind of a kinetic value; there’s a lot of movement,” Spencer said.

She gathered together whatever she found laying around in her studio for her project.

Paper, metal, fabric, weathered photos and wood from old furniture were just a few of the materials used in her portion of the gallery.

In one of her works, which she considers homage to fall and Halloween, Spencer piled together orange and purple stars in a circular fashion.

She described her pieces as the most warm and free, saying that a little bit of her mother, who antiqued for a living, served as a constant theme in a collection that had no particular direction.

She said most of the building materials picked out for her art were left behind to her when her mother passed away.

“As I finished picking what I would use, it became clear that my mother was finding her way into the art,” Spencer said. “There’s just a lot of warmth and openness to what I’ve made.”

Assemblage, Spencer said, is accessible to everyone as long as they maintain a keen eye and spot the potential use in something.

“You can create beautiful things out of nothing,” Spencer said. “You can make stuff out stuff.”

Jaime Lopez can be reached at 581-2812 or jlopez2@eiu.edu.