The engine of a Honda 450 motorcycle roared as Sean Pace, an artist based in Asheville, harnessed its small engine to hurl plastic chickens across the Brickyard Thursday afternoon. As part of the Gregg Museum’s Farfetched exhibit that opened Jan. 17, Pace’s work, titled Chicken Shooter, drew the attention of more than 50 pairs of eyes for the hour the work was on display.

Farfeteched, has been described by Gregg Museum representatives as a way to exhibit mad science, fringe architecture and visionary engineering. In addition to showing off his Chicken Shooter Thursday, the Gregg Museum also exhibited in its location in the Talley Student Center,  two of Pace’s other pieces titled Death Slapper and Social Landscape Painting Machine.

However, in exhibiting Pace’s Chicken Shooter, museum representatives chose to allow Pace to more actively engage students in the midst of student campaigners and student organization representatives.

Brian Dawson, a senior in mechanical engineering, watched with other students the firing-power of Pace’s artwork.

“I just got out of the library and I heard a sound like a motorcycle and I thought that I should come out see what it was, Dawson said. “And then I saw a chicken fly across the Brickyard and I thought it’d be pretty neat to come see what it was. I feel like I enjoy art and I enjoy engineering and design and something like this is really fun so it’s nice to have this out and in front of students.”

In addition to part of a Honda 450 motorcycle, Pace also used a 1954 dentist chair and the rear part of a Mazda B-52 pickup truck to construct his work.

As a founder of the Flood Fine Arts Center in Asheville, Pace said that the Gregg Museum’s exhibition of “mad science” represented a message that resonated with him.

“In the basement of the [center], with a group other people, I created Blue Ridge Biofuels and we started a biodiesal company,” Pace said. “Upstairs, I started the fine arts center… We try to create art and science in the same building to show that creativity is not something that has a border. It really doesn’t. I don’t see anything different between [Chicken Shooter] and a bicycle or a video camera or an iPad. They are all mechanisms of art in some way and they push us further.”

Pace said that with his works exhibited along with the works of other artists at the Gregg Museum, he hopes that the museum will be able to validate audience members’ attempts to try to find artists and mad scientists within themselves.

“I think [Farfetched] is a more inclusive show to the average person because I think we’re all kind of mad scientists,” Pace said.