Three-artist exhibition employs mix of media

By Victoria Gail-White
Advertiser Art Critic

•	Hold And Behold 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily Honolulu Country Club Through Dec. 29 441-9408

Nonetheless, Irons continues to blast us with her typical sense of lively and luscious color. Her monoprint "Vessel Series" suggests a sense of fullness — or emptiness, depending on the viewer's perception. In "Rock-a-Baby" a dark background surrounds a vessel with patterns of green textured dots, hot pinks and orange. Five multicolored orb-like shapes float across the upper portion of the print. "Raku," a particularly lovely print, distills the essence of pit-fired clay into printed form. Graphite-black metallic paints punctuated by a hot magenta background incorporate wisps of fluid lines gouged into the paint. Irons is not sparing with the quantity of paint she uses, and her generous application, given the results in this show, works beautifully.

Nehmad's new work, seven wood pyrographed panels, takes her burned, repetitive mark-making one step further. The panels at first glance seem to be a regression from her more refined pyrographic works on paper.

However, these panels possess an archaic quality, and the language of burned numbers, hash marks, and letters seems less intrusive than its paper counterpart. The unframed panels contain cryptic characteristics as if they have been left behind by an ancient civilization that marked the passage of time, history, danger, and wisdom — all in these tablets of pyrographic prophecy. The basics are all here: fire, tool, piece of wood, message, messenger. True to life, the prophetic-looking messages are encoded and we are left with our own interpretation of their meaning.

Murray, a ceramic teacher at the Richards Street YWCA, exhibits his series of "Honu vessels." They vary in size and employ simple glazes with cut-out images of sea turtles affixed to the outer surface. Many of the larger vessels are particularly impressive.