After donning a thick leather apron, work gloves and a plastic face shield, I pick up a metal bat, stepping toward a carefully composed arrangement of glass jars, cabinet doors and broken plywood. There’s no rage in me as I wind up, and take a small, gentle swing against the table, which sends a bottle plummeting to the ground while toppling a few of the other fragile objects displayed. The crashing sound of broken glass erupts in the room.
I swing the bat once more — one more satisfying pop, cracking a glass vase on the ground — and laugh. Tanya Schatzman and Erica Thrasher, the cousins and founders of Wrecks and Effects, are laughing with me, watching through the window into the wreck room.
"Wreck room." It’s similar to a rage room, but there’s no rage expected in this space. And Wrecks and Effects stands apart from the many rage and break rooms that pepper Northeast Ohio, because here, the broken pieces produced from sessions don’t end up in a trash bin. Instead, they become components of new pieces of art.
“We wanted to capture the wrecking and the effects, like the full circle of the activity,” says Schatzman. “You do both sides. It was important for us to always have that artistic and creative element, so you’re breaking, but we’re also doing something with it.”
“It’s fun to break things,” Thrasher adds, “and it’s even more fun to make things from what you’ve broken.”
The space reflects that energy; it’s half-wreck room, half-art studio. Located on the third floor of IngenuityLabs at 5401 Hamilton Ave. in Cleveland, Wrecks and Effects is filled with handmade art created from the destruction in the wreck room. A mosaic of jagged mirror bits and circuit boards shimmers on the wall. A painting of a snarling mouth on a shredded piece of plywood hangs on the wall. Another piece transforms a former broken television into a painting’s mantra, featuring the words “Do Good Work.”
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Named after the ‘90s group Wreckx-n-Effect, Schatzman and Thrasher were first inspired to create their own wreck room after watching the iconic printer-destruction scene in the 1999 movie Office Space. In 2017, they started hosting the experience in Negative Space gallery as a pop-up event under their studio, named 2 Grown Kids, and later joined IngenuityLabs’ Incubator Program for a bigger location in the Ingenuity building.
Wrecks and Effects and 2 Grown Kids welcomed attendees into its new home for the first time during IngenuityFest in September.
Ever since, the wreck room has welcomed visitors for one-hour reservations during walk-in slots 7-9 p.m. on Thursdays and 1-9 p.m. on Saturdays, along with private events.
Schatzman explains that only 10 minutes of that reservation are usually spent actually breaking items. Visitors use the rest of the time to hang out and create artwork. Schatzman and Thrasher carefully sand down the edges of glass pieces and splintered wood so they can be safely handled and reworked. Here, would-be trash turns into new creative treasures: Even the tiniest pieces of shattered glass become usable glitter.
“We found it was more difficult to recycle than we thought when we started this, so we learned to make more use of our own product, especially the glass,” Schatzman says. “Unfortunately, it's hard to sort everything out, so we just made it work.”
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Both 2 Grown Kids and Wrecks and Effects are passion projects for the co-founders; Schatzman works full-time as an innovation strategist for a Dayton-based IT company, and Thrasher works as a school liaison for University Hospitals.
Since opening Wrecks and Effects, visitors have used the space to celebrate a variety of events: birthdays, divorce parties and family outings. Schatzman and Thrasher also aim to, in the future, create a mobile version of the project to bring their productive wreck room concept to local summer camps and schools.
But while rage rooms first became well-known as outlets for anger and frustration, the Wrecks and Effects founders have pushed back against that idea. Dr. Scott Bea, a clinical psychologist with the Cleveland Clinic, stated in a Cleveland Clinic article that rage rooms aren’t necessarily harmful or helpful, but that they don’t help people manage anger in healthy ways.
Wrecks and Effects is more focused on creative expression, Schatzman clarifies.
“You can be mad. There’s nothing wrong with that. But you don’t have to be,” Schatzman says. “In the end, you’ll be happy — and you’ll walk away with something there. So you’ll have a physical piece of your destruction. There’s always a positive.”
“We say that we’re a break room experience. It’s not just the breaking,” Thrasher says. “It’s the breaking, and the making.”
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