Weather focus of UH Manoa exhibition

By Victoria Gail-White
Advertiser Art Critic

•	'Weatherwise: Graduate Art Exhibition' 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday Noon to 4 p.m. Sunday Through Friday University of Hawai'i Art Gallery 956-6888

"Weather is a metaphor for art and life — we want to predict, control and understand it, but in fact, it always takes us by surprise," they write in their statement.

There are pieces in this show that truly are surprising, multidimensional and vital.

Madeleine Soder's "Current" is a long fabric river made of 24 feet of tea-dyed organza with woven copper wire in the shape of body parts that gives it a three-dimensional effect. "The word 'current,' refers to stream, electrical current and what is going on today," says Soder. "Technology scatters you — radio, television — but there is always something that keeps you together."

In "Respire," large squares of tonally dyed indigo breathe with the assistance of a motorized armature hidden behind a wall, much like the Wizard's performance in Oz. The motor gathers and releases the fish line connected to the four corners of the fabric pieces. Light as air, it inspires us to take a deep breath. This piece is refreshing and energizing in times of holiday stress.

Maya Lea Portner's "Peluspecticum Iterolae" has the appearance of cases of scientific evidence. All three cases are, in fact, from an entomology lab. The piece, made of dyed burnt-out velvet, latex and insect pins, takes on a three-dimensional cellular appearance assisted by the shadows. Meticulous in her installation, which took one week, Portner says of her process, "The work is repetitive, tedious and laborious. I made the motif, worked with it in Photoshop, made a screen, screen-printed it onto the velvet that I dyed, chemically burnt out the fabric, cut it out, sealed the edges with latex, pinned it and backed the pins with rubber so the fabric wouldn't slip." Evocative of thong lingerie, DNA structures and honeycombs, her work deconstructs the feminine — and quite possibly finds a new formula in the process.

Deconstruction and reconstruction are at work in Puni Kukahiko's "He Iwi Koko," made of wood, glass, paint and map prints, and "Hala," made of wood, paint and hala. Her Hawaiian heritage and the ravages of invading cultures and time have given her artistic focus and research a powerful personal resonance. A piece of glass propped on a shelf is etched with the streams of O'ahu and medical drawings of the artist's spine. The spine reference, which is associated with genealogy for Kukahiko, is also repeated in the bench imbedded with hala, down the center of the lauhala mat underneath the bench and in the drawer. A wall-mounted drawer with nails, bones and paint, behind the etched glass, represents a museum case for Kukahiko.

"I resent there are bones in the drawers or that there ever were," she says. "And now there is only the ghost of the bones in the drawers. For myself, as a researcher of my own culture, I am now searching for the metaphorical bones within the drawers that I resent for ever having held bones."

The destruction of land is an important issue for Julie Wooddell Laymon. "Ebb Tide I," a 6-foot unframed oil painting "Is about wearing away," she says. Of her basic black, brown and white palette, "I am trying to paint in a way that is not so literal and use space that goes between pictorial and traditional landscape and abstract or gestural ways of handling the paint," she says. This large, somber abstract has smaller areas that have a fluidity and lightness. Perhaps that is the recovery oozing through.

The self-exploratory paintings of Deidre Britt and Karen Goins deal with different facets of self. For Britt, "Revelation" was instrumental in her developing "a new language using my printmaking as elements of syntax,' she says. Of "Prayer," "How do you picture something which is essentially an unseen entity? How do you picture a soul?"

In five oil on canvas paintings, Goins' face is painted in various stages of vacuity. "There is always this veil or this barrier whenever you relate to anybody or even yourself," she says. "It is haunting in a way I find beautiful." Three of the self-portraits have the paint scraped back so that only the stain of the paint remains. They are soft, yet definitely haunting.

George Newton's sculpture need an outdoor arena. In "Cycles," two connected, approximately 10-foot aluminum circles disconnect on one side. "When the wind blows they will move," say Newton. This simple yet elegant piece is not shown to its best advantage in this gallery space. Wave-like, nautilus-like and silvery like the moon, it needs the air, the water and the moonlight to charge it up.

Anson Tsang's hybrid sculpture "Untitled" is a Hieronymus Bosch-like figure of monkeypod wood, steel and bronze. A cast-bronze human face (which is Tsang's) looks upwards from a plump bird body made of light-colored monkey pod with steel wings and clawed feet. "I respond and try to be true to the materials," says Tsang.

Bud Spint's floor-to-ceiling circular burnt newspaper sculpture, "An Armor of Roses," was inspired by the poem, "The Glance" by Jelaludin Rumi.

Other works in glass, ceramic, electronic media and fiber by Derrich Arata, Jon Ikegami, Derek Erwin, Steve Coy, Eli Baxter, Thomas Wassen, Jacob Jackson, Soonjurng Kwon and Donna Ropt further expound on the Weatherwise theme.