At the corner of Kilihau and Ahua streets, shipping containers and debris boxes have been arranged to form a kind of courtyard. They have been banged about as if by giant fists, the paint cracked and peeled. Some are stenciled with the words "island demo" in fading block letters.

Taken in all at once, these are the monumental public sculptures of everyday life. One also finds smaller sections that rival modernist paintings, as oxidation running its course in crumpled folds of steel has its own entirely natural beauty.

However, rust doesn't reflect the traditional spirit of the 'aina or the tourist's paradise. After all, this is the byproduct of globalization and the island's working-class infrastructure. But this casual assemblage has been impacted and weathered by sun, shower and salt, the very same forces that inform much of the artwork produced in Hawai'i.

Bringing a borderline-political emphasis to this year's "Artists of Hawai'i" exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, juror Russell Ferguson has pulled a thread through much of the work, one connected to this Hawai'i-as-it-is we are all familiar with.

Though we might begin at any point on the thread, Erika Luecke's "AO X" and "AO XI" make for a stunning departure. The Masonite panels are stratified into horizontal bands of rust-colored textures and weathered industrial brush strokes. She has sanded, stripped, scraped and re-coated these surfaces to the point where they become formal abstractions of the wild finishes visible at Island Demo's Mapunapuna transfer station.

Luecke has tamed the natural processes of erosion, and with an artist's unique perception, created a reference chart of nature's interactions with our built environment. From this index, we can easily imagine the ochre plumes decorating the sides of many buildings: a long-term signature of neglected rain gutters, like those found in Brian Malanaphy's large-scale portraits of commercial buildings.

In "AAA Saw Shop," such signs of life are emphasized at the edges of the building's cinder block surface of industrial off-white paint.

Though originally as generic as any of the pre-fabricated businesses being built today, time and human-scaled daily patronage in a pre-Wal-Mart era has given the building an unmistakable character.

Lawn mowers are lined up on the sidewalk like hitched horses (some of them mating!) in the shadow of a corrugated steel awning. We will never see a Starbucks or even a Local Motion with the proprietor's residence above it, complete with a tiny American flag, old air ducts, vintage television aerials and the wood panels of a hand-built lanai. Hundreds of such buildings are being reclaimed in favor of condos and retail franchises.

Marc Thomas' vast "Untitled No. 10," presented in horizontal strips and accumulating layers, also functions as a kind of index or map. He works with a foundation of unremarkable colors used for cheap wall coverage, the drips, the can rings and the unfinished strokes that evoke "common" approaches to painting. Then he invents an urban almost-language of color patches: warning yellows, sky blues, no-parking reds, all decorated with color trails that could be the shadows of power lines or the fingerprints of a thousand passing window shoppers.

Everything isn't explicitly urban. Ferguson includes works that address nature with startling levels of interacting repetition, echoing aerial views of housing developments on the leeward slopes of the Ko'olaus.

The painterly photographs of Richard Palmer's "Lichen on Acacia Koa" and Estelle Joeng's "Birth of a Cloud" operate at the opposing scales of tree bark and cliff faces. "Lichen" is hyper-dense with diverse greens, a city of tiny plants so drenched with luminescence that one might imagine this as the source of koa's ability to capture and polish sunlight. Joeng has documented a cloud assembling itself, as if from the vapor emitted by the dozens of shoestring waterfalls and the mass exhalation of plants clinging to the cliffs. In both cases, we see a level of complexity typically associated with human culture and construction.

In both cases, we are invited to contemplate Hawai'i's unique expression of these processes.

Piliamo'o (Mark Hamasaki and Kapulani Landgraf) have been working along these lines for years. One of their photographs, "Na Moa'e Kukuku," documents a graveyard of cars amid towering mangroves. Among Ferguson's other selections, this indictment of human actions blends into a more abstract look at the traces people leave on the land.

Should we judge the abandoned rowboat in Kathleen Carr's "Boat, Molokai II" on the same terms as the dead automobiles? Perhaps associating the vanishing labor of fishing by hand with nobility charges Carr's infrared, hand-colored photo with romanticism. There is a difference between power derived from fossil fuel and that derived from muscle. The difference structures the very discourse of sustainability and environmental responsibility. Here we are, living in a situation where the SUV could easily go the way of Carr's boat ... her nostalgic riff meets Piliamo'o's glimpse of the future.

This is perhaps the core of Ferguson's question emphasizing what it means to be "of" Hawai'i.

The timing of this show is perfect. One can certainly judge the work in terms of its market value or where it falls in the arc of a given artist's career; such are the established modes of Hawai'i art consumption. However, Ferguson has done something a bit radical with his openly brandished haole curator status: he's gently shifted the context of these Hawai'i artists' work to more directly align it with the contemporary art currents of the global village. But not without giving us a very clever and subtly polished mirror.

David A.M. Goldberg is a cultural critic and writer. He is a lecturer in art, art history and American studies at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.

This year's 'Artists of Hawai'i' align their work with the greater contemporary art world

WHO IS RUSSELL FERGUSON?

Russell Ferguson is the chairman of the University of California-Los Angeles Art Department and a curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. His background is in contemporary art and cultural criticism. He approached his duties as juror with an emphasis on being an outsider. Rather than pretending to completely understand Hawai'i or the established traditions that inform the work of its artists, he selected works that clearly marked their point of origin without looping back on themselves. He has managed to put a subtle emphasis on the word "of" in the phrase "Artists of Hawai'i." This year's exhibition speaks to the local population in a slightly different dialect than past exhibitions. It also samples our artists' voices for use in the dialogue on globalization and urbanization that is the raw material for so much contemporary art at the international level.