The piece begins with a museum-like introductory cabinet display of pages torn from an old book, words whited out, except for those certain words that spell out the artist's message.

Chan's work richly resonates, a haunting melody that insinuates itself into a responsive listener's soul.

Pia Stern received her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of California-Berkeley and was influenced by such Bay Area figurative artists as David Park, Joan Brown, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn.

Her textured and layered canvases suggest symbolic, totemic interior landscapes filled with subconscious mana.

In her oils "Portal" and "Mapping," she continues to display a fine sense of painterly impasto color — the oranges dancing with the blue-greens — accented by bold, linear black lines, an off-white field kissing and expanse of a jet-black night sky.

The underlying realms of unsettled mystery and shamanistic ritual give way to institutional containment and depressive confinement, with only a hint of escape in the glowing orange promise of a window out of the cuckoo's nest.

Expanded arts teacher Peter Chamberlain's playful, inventive use of materials and finely tuned tactile sensibility find effective expression in "Secrets of the Trinity Exposed," a multimedia construct of digital prints and recycled devices that move in the wind.

Master sculptor/artist Fred Roster's heroic-scaled and subtly colored "Workspace" encapsulates and completes the predominate affect of the exhibition: a perhaps imagined artist's studio shelves, filled with mostly sawdust- and dust-covered small items — faces, portraits, hands, small plaster and bronze sculptures, toys, models, ceramic pieces, bottled fish, miniature machines, art books and supplies — a lifetime accumulation evidencing the journey that spins off a cluttered collection of things, traces of memories that make up most of our lives, artist and nonartist alike.

"Julius Caesar at the Forum," from "An excerpt of 'Historic Characters and Famous Events (Plates),' " found silver-gelatin photography on bookplates, by Gaye Chan, associate professor of photography

Which is not to say that the exhibition is totally bereft of light and laughter.

Printmaker Duncan Dempster's untitled mixed-media light box evokes Downtown/Kaka'ako vistas seen through a cartoonish, rose-colored haze.

Robert Rodeck's 3-D computer-generated anglyphic prints offer a momentary diversion if not a particularly deep human experience.

And Debra Drexler's works using water-soluble pencil and crayon on paper — with their bright primary colors and surreal and symbolic imagery — offer a break from the otherwise muted pallets and bittersweet sensibilities on display.

But for sheer fun and light, painter Donald Dugal, assisted by the Kennedy Theatre's technical director Daniel Anteau, has created a deceptively simple, almost conceptual piece, "Art-Lite: Ladder Play," in which the punning title tells it all.

It sits in a darkened room in the middle of the exhibition space, consisting of three stage spotlights — gelled green, blue and red — which are thrown through a ladder against a wall on which the viewer's shadow is also thrown, creating a play of complementary magenta, yellow and cyan shadows, together with intermediate color mixes.

At once effectively didactic and tongue in cheek, Dugal's piece exemplifies what can be best in latter-day academic art — the term itself unfortunately filled with pejorative connotations from 19th-century European art history: cleverly instructive wit at the service of discerning human creativity.