New Khewhok work is about contrasts

By Victoria Gail-White
Advertiser Art Critic

•	'No Hidden Agenda' Works on paper by Sanit Khewhok 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday bibelot gallery 738-0368

No stranger to art on the edge, Khewhok is collections manager at the Contemporary Museum and curator of the Hawai'i Pacific University Gallery.

On entering the gallery, we are greeted by his self-portraits, two tiny dry-point etchings. They are almost a reassurance, a ground wire, for what awaits us around the corner.

The series of five "Double Portrait" red-dirt pigment paintings have collaged eyes and hairdos. The face collage elements, which are applied after the painting is done, are cut from news magazines. These quirky works seem to ask questions: Who are we? What part of us is real/invented/changed through cosmetics, surgery and the past? Considering the contemporary issues many artists face today, Khewhok, in a low-tech way, is on the same wavelength as Paul Pfeiffer.

The series continues with a group of still-life and painted photographs incorporating strange juxtapositions of elements that both delight and repulse us. In "Animal Lover," a portrait of a woman is painted in red-dirt pigment with an owl on her head in the top portion of the piece and a vertically collaged image of a rat in the lower portion. In "No Hidden Agenda" and "Entertainment Today," a lineup of white cloth-wrapped dead bodies reminds us of one of the inevitable consequences of war.

Khewhok's compositions, although seemingly capricious at times, thread the past into the present. His attention to detail and the primitive pigment used in his painting give these works a historic reference, while the slick, colored collage elements remind us of modern times.

On the right wall we are renewed and refreshed from the left-wall urban chaos by a series of soft, delicate silver point and graphite landscape drawings.

"I wanted to show two facets of life," says Khewhok. And although the end product was important, he became more interested in the process. "On a recent trip to Thailand, I was reminded of the pigments in the earth and the things we have lost," he says. "Under my feet there were at least six shades of color that could be mixed from white to yellow ochre to brown." His red-dirt paintings and silverpoint drawings (a technique of drawing with a silver stylus on specially prepared paper) bridge modern images and archaic methods.

In Khewhok's series of silverpoint drawings, a tree appears to come to life, emerging from a grid of meticulously drawn fine lines and a whisper of blue sky in "Makiki Blue." The soft mountain range in "Hawaii Kai" is either fading into the mist or emerging from it.