Dorothy Faison's "Recirculating Ratoon (for Michael)," oil and mixed media on canvas, 58 x 120 inches, 2001/2004.

Dorothy Faison

Honolulu artist Dorothy Faison was born in New York and spent six years in Central and South America before coming to Hawai'i with her family. She holds fine arts degrees from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.

"Under Currents," Faison's dramatic exhibition of recent works, deals with text and subtext: themes of separation, containment, esoteric and hermetic traditions and protection, enriched by hidden layers of subconscious significance and dreamlike meaning, alchemy of the soul.

This rich archetypal significance and multileveled meaning are communicated through the palpable and powerful physical presence inherent on the surface and in the implied depths of her works. Oil, pigment, alkyd, watercolor, charcoal and Chromacoal and Lithocoal sticks are used on paper, canvas and copper with masterful technique in the service of magical incantation.

With stylistic echoes from Hieronymus Bosch to Francis Bacon, she manages to suggest in her deeply felt and utterly original canvases Freudian as well as Jungian interpretations, the effect enhanced by the obscure Latin titles — visions, perhaps, of the more subtle torments of hell.

Recurrent thematic images make up the shamanistic language of her work: boats, bath tubs, coffins, islands, dogs, cats, rats, rabbits, tents, playing cards and playing card symbols, dice, umbrellas, miniature paintings-within-painting, beehives, golf course holes, biological specimen jars and helicopters all mysteriously invoke the life cycles of birth, love, death and rebirth, the journeys out of body to the heavens and to the nether world to recover the gemstones of healing and redemption.

Totemic, tactile, mysterious and hauntingly suggestive, Faison's painting vocabulary springs to life through her use of thick, luscious painterly impastos and soft kisses, an unerring sense of well worn, weathered color, and a precise and bold linear design.

Her work —Êespecially in the heroic oil and mixed media on canvas "Recirculating Ratoon (for Michael)" — pays homage not only to the late sculptor Michael G.B. Tom but also to the American master Jackson Pollack, whose tortured spirit hovers over these tremendously accomplished and arresting images.

Akiko Kotani's "Red Rain #3 and #4," silk drawing on three layers of silk organza, two panels, each 43 x 40 inches, 2001.

Akiko Kotani

Born in Honolulu, fiber artist Akiko Kotani received her painting degree from the University of Hawai'i. She subsequently worked for two years with a Mayan Indian weaver in Guatemala as she pursued her growing interest in fiber, inspired initially by her mother's work in the medium. She then earned her master's degree at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and is Professor Emerita of Art at Slippery Rock University in western Pennsylvania.

This exhibition of her recent work from 2001-2005, displayed on the second floor of the First Hawaiian space, celebrates the drawn line with silk thread drawings on such diverse grounds as casa sheer, silk organza, linen scrim and hand-woven canvas.

At first glance, these mostly oversized stitched pieces, at once gestural and calligraphic as well as deliberate and meditative, seem a bit overblown and overscaled. A closer look, however, brings a deeper experience, a synthesis of Bauhaus and Buddhism.

Natural phenomena figure prominently in her work, as in the 2005 "Storm-Daniel," a silk drawing on three layers of translucent linen scrim, inspired by the Doppler images of the hurricane that hit our islands in 2000.

"Andes I," a 2005 silk drawing also on linen scrim, recalls an aerial panorama she experienced on a flight over Peru.

The playful forms in "Pollen in Winter #1," a drawing with silk on three layers of silk organza, were inspired by the dust in her studio.

Linen scrim, the same material used for theatrical set construction and light effects, literally provides Kotani with an expanded canvas that sometimes produces less than monumental effects.

Kotani recently studied the scratched bark drawings of the pygmy women of the Mbuti tribe of the Congo's Ituri rain forest. This experience ultimately produced her "Black on White (#1-8)" series, sewn silk line drawings on hand woven silk canvas, linear visual explorations of interconnected relationship.

Original and subtle, Kotani's work offers the viewer a gentle but powerful visual experience.

Hal Lum

Hal Lum studied ceramics at the College of San Mateo in California and received his studio degrees from UH-Manoa and California State University, San Francisco. He lived and worked in New York for eight years and now works here as a professional photographer and artist.

Lum's nonobjective, primarily organic form acrylic and pencil on paper compositions in bright colors display imagery suggestive of the industrial landscape: cogs, smokestacks, laboratories, conveyor belts.

He has been influenced by a wide variety of art, from Japanese haniwa pottery to minimal sculpture, art both high and low art, naive and ethnic.

Sometimes appearing somewhat overworked, the pieces have a distinctly 1930s feel, from the Paul Klee-like "Mobile" to "Boogie Woogie," in title and spirit reminiscent of the famous painting by Mondriaan.

The earlier works are tight, featuring repeated shapes that are then washed in layers of acrylic paint to create visual depth and complexity. His recent works are loser and more playful, their titles suggestive of not immediately obvious dimensions to his images, such as "Haniwa," "Take the Time," "Buffalo" and "Mandela."

Karin Mori

Honolulu-born Karin Mori received her art degrees from UC-Santa Cruz and the University of Iowa. She works as an exhibitions and education officer at the Phoenix Arts Association in Brighton, England.

She states that her "working process — of creating dense layers of marks and forms that reveal and conceal deeper levels — has a metaphorical equivalent in the forests and richly animate natural geography and cultural landscape of the islands."

Mori's black-and-white drawings use a restrained palette of deep, velvet blacks made with compressed charcoal, dusty gray smudges created by softer charcoal wiped away with a flannel cloth, the pewter sheen of graphite, sprays of pencil dots and black wax rubbed across the raised surfaces of objects under the paper.

Using simple and readily obtainable materials, her work defines what is true about all authentic art: an economy of means in the service of a creative vision.

The drawings bear the physical traces of her process: pin and sandpaper scratches, brush scrubbing, repeated erasures, the whole resulting in the buildup of many semitransparent layers, augmented by monoprints, transfers, stencils, tracings, collage or a wash of ink or acrylic paint.

Mori's titles evoke the often elusive imagery that may have started as the drawing's initial inspiration: "Cape," "Kahili," "Reef Runway," "Heiau," "Hapu'u" and "Pele."

Skillfully displayed in the separate upstairs gallery in graceful counterpoint with Lum's all color work, Mori's work — like the apocryphal stains on the walls of a Michelangelo or a da Vinci that may have stimulated their imaginative imaging —offers the viewer a refreshing and rare opportunity to think and see for himself.