Pigments. Wood. Graphite. These are elemental media that artists can charge with so much energy and recombine with such complexity that it is easy to forget how closely related they can be. Our heads are so filled with drawings, paintings and objects, that we can be distracted by what we think we see in what the artist is trying to show us: a person, an idea, a form.

Kirk Kurokawa, Sharon Doughtie, William Ichinose and Dana Forsberg certainly present us with shapes, thoughts and people. However, none of them allows representation to obscure the deeper aspects of their respective media. These artists all point toward what can happen if we stop taking our preconceptions for granted and instead focus on how we conceive our perceptions, by opening the doors of the utterly familiar.

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT

Oil painter Kirk Kurokawa works at the borders of photorealism, with a keen sense of lighting and a talent for capturing posture and expression. Kendo students line up for practice, young women sit on a grassy hill, birds fly by, a young man contemplates his shoe. The images are almost unremarkable — Kurokawa embraces the mundane in a bold, graphic style. Realism and recognizability captures the viewer's attention, but illumination holds it.

In his most successful works luminous shadows, highlights of a youth's bowl cut, and the glowing transparency of a plastic shopping bag seem to emerge as a result of contemplating them.

Kurokawa's portrait of Maui painter Tadashi Sato (which won the Jurors' Choice Award in the 2006 Schaefer Portrait Challenge on Maui) exemplifies this approach. Sato sits in profile against a gray background, hands clasped in front of him, elbows resting on the arms of a director's chair. The folds in his collared shirt and jeans are rendered with a perfect balance of gravity and volume. He is wearing sneakers. Slippers are visible in the background. That's it. Everything else, the emotion, the respect, the memory and the invocation is produced by radiosity itself. Sato is rendered simultaneously weightless and bold, with a clarity that erases his age without denying it.

In general, and particularly in the case of the Sato portrait, Kurokawa's use of light is an admirable attempt to help the viewer perfect — and thereby refine — their memory of the subject, even on their first encounter.

WHAT SHE SAW

The unreliability of memory is the unsettling terrain of Forsberg's series of portraits produced in collaboration between a police sketch artist, five different subjects (including the artist), and six "witnesses" who know them in various degrees of intimacy. The five sets of six pencil portraits evoke morphing and comic strips. Amusement gives way to a vague discomfort and a touch of horror as a given individual is remembered in radically different ways. Forsberg undermines assumptions that art in the service of crime-fighting is somehow more objective or accurate than what Kurokawa does. She shows us how we treat our capacity to remember as if it were a Ziploc bag, when its actual porousness can lead to stunningly unique expressions.

One is tempted to question whether their spouses and relatives actually know what they look like, and if they could accurately describe them in turn. One is also inclined to wonder about the impact the police artist's technique has on the witness and whether decisions get made in terms of the aesthetics of the sketch itself. Did a witness think "she doesn't look angry enough" and have the image adjusted accordingly? A composite sketch is built from units of recognition with terms like "racial focus," "emotional focus" and "aging focus," not actual perceptions. It becomes clear why subjects in the series veer wildly towards and away from their race, seem defined by emotions, and apparently vary in age.

Forsberg learned that witnesses presented with suspects in a lineup often try to recall the sketch instead of the actual face. If our brains are indeed better at recognizing than they are at describing, what then are the means by which actual differences between things are established?

PACE OF THE HAND

In the turned wood bowls of Sharon Doughtie, incised spirals of Celtic knots and red knots of Norfolk Island pine are emphasized by contrasting techniques of burning and staining. They recall strands of DNA and cells. Viewed from certain angles, they lose their three-dimensionality and become ... paintings? Meanwhile William Ichinose's woodwork is also decorated with patterns that aren't just "natural" in the generic sense but equal parts biological and geological. His bowls and platters appear to float, as if supported by the reflections their rich stains project onto their pedestals. They too drift in and out of scultpural states, depending on where one is standing in relation to them.

Both artists have the advantage of departing from functionality rather than representation as they pursue their art. An artist can turn a bowl into a symbolic vessel in general. It then attains a new mode of functionality — to hold an idea, spirit or entire universe — without losing recognizability as a bowl. In our era of synthetic faces and software that emulates paint these bowls should be witnessed on their own terms. To contemplate these objects that are coherent statements in themselves and not mass reproductions is to re-ground one's self in the pace and scale of the hand. Doughtie and Ichinose's work illuminates and varies the connections to that which is active and alive inside us at this very moment.

David A.M. Goldberg is a cultural critic and writer. He is a lecturer in Art and Art History and American Studies at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.