Billed as the first multimedia festival in the Pacific showcasing the best emerging female artists from Hawai'i and abroad, participants include Michelle Bassler, Elea Dumas, Kandi Everett, Tracey Gunn, Rachel Kaiser, Kim Kinard, the late Samantha Maeshiro, Meleanna Meyer, Moana Meyer, Bianca Mills, Erin Williamson and the children of the "Through My Eyes" art workshop, among others. It was curated by first-time curator and artist Kim Kinard.

Proceeds from sale of the artworks — which are very affordably priced — benefit the Safe Zone Foundation, domestic violence prevention services and the local independent art scene.

The exhibition is perhaps more important for its role in the overall festival than for its own sake. The show is uneven in quality and suffers from a less-than-polished design.

Great art can be created within a "message" framework, but it does so with extreme effort and against considerable odds.

First and foremost, art must tap into the deepest wellsprings of feeling and desire, not dance lightly on the surface of "saying."

Only a few pieces stand on their own with any authority or presence.

Though hardly new and emerging, Kandi Everett is a consummate and witty artist whose work is always delightful and engaging.

"Frog, Dragonfly, Princess," a lovely, intimate graphite-and-colored-pencil drawing, displays her gifts in graphic and colorist flourishes.

Thematically, the piece is just right, with its darker intimations of perhaps a cruel version of the fairytale little-girl fantasy of flying away with Prince Charming.

Equally accomplished in her more familiar, slightly tongue-in-cheek and wonderfully naughty mode is her "Bra Stories: ... '58 Over the Shoulder Boulder Holder," a hand-colored dry-point print that certainly is an appropriate offering in any exhibition celebrating girls.

Jackie Hilton's polaroid transfer print "Wings of Anorexia" likewise is an appropriate visual meditation on a subject closely allied with the violence our society insidiously inflicts upon women in the service of image.

"Jen Pregnant," Bianca Mills' tasteful color digital print, creates a suitably watery and otherworldly feeling that is appropriate for the subject matter and for the exhibition's theme.

For the most part, the rest of the works lack either technical skill or expressive power.

At the heart of the exhibition, however, is the impossibly sad and suffering work of the late Samantha Maeshiro.

A suicide in her early 20s, Maeshiro left a legacy that still powerfully speaks of the pain and suffering endured by women in our society.

Technically, her photographic images are done in a technique known as mordancage.

Mordancage uses a bleach formula on a photographic print that is developed but not fixed, leaving the image to fade completely over time with the exposure of light.

What remains is metallic silver (the black image) as well as the remaining silver halide (the unexposed original emulsion not yet washed away).

To these prints Maeshiro added straight pins and stitching in thread, creating in the process the visual correlatives to poems by Sylvia Plath.

Plath's life, and especially her death — perhaps like that of Maeshiro's — have never been fully understood.

An acclaimed poet and novelist, Plath was the golden girl who had everything: beauty and brains, a great and recognized talent, a family that included a daughter and a son.

Yet, on a third attempt, she committed suicide in 1963 at age 31.

•	Girl Fest Gallery Works by emerging female artists 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, through June 5 Closing Gallery Reception: 5-10 p.m. June 4 The ARTS at Marks Garage Free, 521-2903

The fact that the images will fade utterly away in time only adds to their heartbreaking impact and resonance.

Fear, hopelessness, decay, soul-numbing sadness inform these images of arms stitched with painful black thread, body parts overlaid with dress-making patterns that invite the scissors' slash.

These images are powerful, but were not created for this exhibition. They were birthed out of a tortured, living human experience, a scream in the coldness of a moonless night.

Art created for whatever agenda — even at the service of a profoundly important issue like violence to women — must speak of the artist's personal experience in order to transcend mere illustration, agit-prop, or pornography.

Maeshiro's work pushes us solidly to confront deeply and personally the issues of violence to women in our society.

Her work also stands in fitting tribute to her gifts that saw expression for only a moment in her all-too-brief life.