Photographs capture ephemeral history of Islands

By David C. Farmer
Special to The Advertiser

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Upcoming events at the Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center: Jan. 16-April 13: "Emergent Records: Recent Work by Jianjie"; "Constant Color: New Work by Donna Broder and George Woolard"; and "Matter and Material: A Group Sculpture Exhibition of Hawai'i Artists" April 23-Sept. 7: The sculpture of Bumpei Akaji and "Post-Tattoo: Works by Kandi Everett, Don Ed Hardy and Mike Malone" At the Cafe Jan. 16: Mixed media works by Rosalinda Kolb, Barbara Okamoto and Deborah Young At the Makiki Heights main gallery Through Feb. 1: Videos, sculptures, and photography of Paul Pfeiffer Feb. 20-May 2: A tribute to Claude Horan Sean K.L. Browne sculptures, Elaine Meyers photographs Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center, Upper Gallery 526-1322 Through Jan. 6

As part of that celebration, the museum has boasted its usual top-quality exhibitions. Two exhibitions now showing under the Contemporary's auspices fit that pattern.

Through Tuesday, the upstairs galleries of the museum at First Hawaiian Center in downtown Honolulu feature the extremely complementary works of sculptor Sean K.L. Browne and photographer Elaine Mayes, both of whom speak of Hawai'i from distinctly different perspectives.

Mayes' vision is grounded in a solid commercial and academic career that has finely honed her vision and sensibility.

As is often the case, what we longtime residents can often take for granted or just not see at all, a visitor with Mayes' sensitivity and craft can reveal, imbuing us with new eyes.

Consider the glowing Christmas vision of the exterior of a comfortable home on Manoa's Lowrey Avenue at twilight, the warm glow of lights within, the valley's low clouds providing a rain-filled, cotton candy ceiling to an image expressive of the unique reality of our island winter holidays.

Her inkjet prints on archival paper are technically exquisite.

Although most of her prints are struck from negatives made more than 10 years ago, the print medium is state-of-the-art, utilizing a process and materials that have been widely questioned from a curatorial point of view because their longevity has been untested.

Two of her larger and very impressive landscapes, measuring 35 by 50 inches, have been acquired by the State Foundation on Culture on the Arts, testimony that the medium has arrived in the mainstream.

These acquisitions also speak to another unmistakable feature of this gifted artist's work: working with the grain of the inherently nostalgic medium, capturing moments in time that are immediately lost forever.

This is art in the service of history and poignant story telling.

View her "Airport Crop, The Last Pineapples, Lana'i," and witness a moment from over 10 years ago that records not only that particular lost moment, but the end of an era and an island lifestyle that will likely never return.

Mayes not only documents Moloka'i's now-vanished Pau Hana Inn and the aftermath of Iniki's fury on Kaua'i with loving care, she raises them to a new order through her powerful and assured grasp of color, form, and measured composition.

It's not difficult to see that one of her photographic mentors was Minor White, known for his belief, influenced by Asian philosophy, in the sacred and spiritual quality of photography.

While favoring personal emotions and creativity, White sought to encourage his students to acquire a total mastery of every technical aspect of the medium.

Mayes has acquired that total mastery.

There is a bittersweet sadness in her poetic and evocative images that completely capture, albeit inexplicitly, the combination of breath-taking beauty and troubled restlessness and resignation that often characterizes the subjective emotional experience of our island home.

The bulk of the work resulting in the negatives that created the prints on display in this show was done during a one-year Guggenheim fellowship starting in 1991, when Mayes was able to spend one month each on six of our major islands.

In each unique community, she has observed specifically, deeply, and lovingly.

We recognize the familiar world of Tony Parinas and his friends, captured on a relaxed porch in Lana'i City.

And in that most fiendishly difficult, multifinger exercise known as the group portrait, she pulls off the near-miraculous in "Keiki Dancers, Hula Kahiko, Kumu Hula Iwalani Kalima, King Kamehameha Celebration, Kailua, Kona, Island of Hawai'i."

Wild sheep on Moloka'i, apocalyptic cane fires and a forlorn sugar mill on Maui, Hawai'i's spectacular Mauna Kea: the breadth of her vision is surpassed only by its depth.

In her very best pieces, we are reminded that photography can sometime achieve poetic epiphany — when the structure of a subject is so adjusted that the soul of the most common object seems radiant.

In "Slippers, Manoa Valley Buddhist Temple," the objects achieve their epiphany.

This is truly a magical exhibition that delivers what quality art often promises: an authentic experience that will renew your love and vision of the cultural diversity and humanity of this most special place on Earth.

Upstairs with Mayes' photographic love letters from Hawai'i are the bold and impressive granite, marble, and cast bronze maquettes and full-scale sculptures of Browne.

Browne's achievements are impressive, and this exhibition marks his first since 1989.

Well-known especially for such forms as his mahiole (Hawaiian helmet) and niho lei palaoa (whale-tooth pendant), he is in great demand for public and private commissions that require boldness in size and instant clarity in readability.

On these scores, Browne is clearly on top of his game.

At least for this writer's taste, far more intriguing and mysterious are the smaller and quite erotically suggestive fleshy shapes of such works as "Holua (Slide)" and "Lotus I."

Browne's craft is unmistakable, as he undertakes to wrestle with some of the more challenging and difficult artistic materials and techniques.

He equates, or at least draws parallels between, traditional Japanese ceramic traditions and sensibility — as incarnated in the 20th century by such artists as Isamu Noguchi, with whom Browne studied on a Fulbright in 1985 — and traditional Native Hawaiian tool forms such as the adz, helmet, cape, and, fish hook.

The question persists: Do these concerns translate into works that stimulate a viewer's eyes to see with a fresh, renewed vision?

The slope is slippery, given these sources, aspirations and tensions, and Browne is to be congratulated for his consistency and dedication.

Stop by the First Hawaiian Center before the show closes and check out how you personally respond to these two artists' attempts to speak bravely of this place and time, present and past.

•	Prints by Jennifer Callejo, Timothy Contreras and Keiko Kamata Contemporary Museum Cafe 2411 Makiki Heights Drive 526-1322 Through Jan. 25

Callejo works with recycled printmaking plates that retain the residue of past images. She uses the relationship between the old plate images and her new images of people to explore how memories can "change perceptions entirely."

Contreras investigates the flowers, plants and trees he sees everyday: "This closer inspection makes me appreciate their beauty even more, and it is this beauty that I try to capture in these prints."

Kamata's screen prints resemble out-of-focus images of figures and buildings yet are not meant to represent definable objects.

She is concerned instead with limiting the "mind's immediate analysis of what is being depicted."

The viewer is left to experience how the image is organized visually rather than deciding what the picture represents.

"The mind feels the atmosphere of the image, lingering somewhere between the familiar and the foreign."

Guest writer David C. Farmer produced the Sunday art column from 1975 to 1976. He holds a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting and drawing and a master's degree in Asian and Pacific art history. Art critic Victoria Gail-White is on a break.