The Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts’s Crowell and West Galleries opened the exhibition “Light and Loud” on Thursday, January 16. Curated by Fernando Orellana, the works of Melinda McDaniel and Lucha Rodriguez are on display. The works of these women create a strange sense of calmness and intrigue.

McDaniel specializes in ceramic figures that explore the complexities of human emotion. She displays various aspects of the mortal psyche with gently morphed fairytale creatures: Sphinxes meld into cherubic legs, human heads sprout wings and stray fingertips splinter out of carefully molded beings beside part-feline, part-kitchenware creatures.

Rodriguez’s “Knife Drawing[s]” are beautiful watercolors with intricately sliced carvings swirling through each work. The light pinks rest in the center of each canvas, brought to life by the feathered waves of each subtle raised texture.

McDaniel’s “Subscription[s]” critique commercialism and excess in everyday life. Magazines are zip-tied and smothered in dollops of hot glue. The covers, depicting natural life and untouched by man, allude to the surface- level interaction between man and Earth. The layers of destruction strangled beneath the glossy front pages are reduced to slivers of twisting color, left to the digestion of the spectator.

Kerin Sulock writes that “Light and Loud” creates an environment in which “the senses are solicited. Texture and color, depth and contour invite the eye—even the ear and hand—to comprehend their subject. But what’s discovered there is not limited to sensory pleasure, though pleasure is abundant. Satisfying the senses in this rich show means personal entanglement in the darker side of desire.”

The exhibit will remain until February 28, 2020.