The installation is the combination African and ritualistic images with color and vivid embellishment of primary colors.
"Good" art is usually hard to figure out, and moody beatniks in black usually like it that way. But sometimes art is appreciated because it is asthetically pleasing, not because it is confusing.
The current Rasdall Gallery exhibit is engaging with vibrant colors with intricate voodoo dolls and small glass jars.
"Sidewalk Boogie Funk," senior Kendall Costich's bachelor of fine arts exhibition, will be held in the gallery through April 21.
The installation is the combination African and ritualistic images with color and vivid embellishment of primary colors.
Costich began her career as an artist in graphic design, but thought it was "too anal" and decided to start painting and working in fiber and mixed media.
"I love to delve and explore in different varieties of art and mix it all together," she said.
Costich's eclectic style is evident in a wire "man" whose stomach is filled with wire shavings and colored telephone wire creates a lion mane around the face of the figure and shapes the feet and hands of the metal sculpture.
The voodoo theme is most evident in a large ritual piece is surrounded by torn fabric around the perimeter with a large box supporting canes and voodoo dolls. Standing above the box are two large metal figures painted and covered with more telephone wire.
Fiber professor Arturo Sandoval had Costich as a student and believes that she is still evolving as an artist but has had success thus far.
"Kendall is very idea-oriented, and she is at a point that all these materials coming together in unity of themes," Arturo said. "Like all of us, she is still growing."
Costich said Sandoval and her work in fiber art expanded her artistic range.
"Fiber art made me look deeper into things that I never looked into before," Costich said. "Arturo helped me embellish non-traditional material."
Using staples, telephone wire, wood, metal in combination with woven cloth dolls that resemble voodoo icons, Costich incorporates mystic culture into her art.
"The figures are my imaginary icon bush devils and bush goddesses," she said. "An African tribe believed that beyond the perimeter of their huts there were bush devils, so anything shiny or modern the tribes people had gotten it from a bush devil."
She took the idea of the bush devils and decided to form her own goddess as a powerful feminine power.
"My art is kind of light and people think it is fun," Costich said.
Fun is good way to describe her installation.
Telephone wire that resembles crazy string and various beads, glass and colored tiles decorate the gallery in this technicolor junkyard.
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