Dineh Moghdam Davis, associate professor of communications at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, world traveler and artist, is someone whose "specialty is being a generalist and whose area of focus is the periphery." Over the course of phone and e-mail-based conversations, I came to understand her as what I call anti-disciplinarian, whose leading edge of thought and creativity cuts across rather than re-inscribes boundaries. She flows, unburdened by any core ideology, from discussions of pedagogy to technology to artistic methods to globalization.

She studied anthropology, French and linguistics, and settled on a doctoral degree in information science. At the same time, she explored various artistic media including wood and iron work, ceramics, and painting; all largely on her own terms and as a means of private expression. As someone who constantly crosses borders between disciplines and places, it would only be a matter of time before her artistic and professional pursuits overlapped. While waiting around for students to log on to ask questions during a pioneering pre-millennium online course at UH, she began playing with software that allowed her to convert scanned photographs into simulations of watercolor paintings. She hasn't bothered to disentangle the braid of art and technology.

Her show, "Apparition: Dream, Darkness and Reflections," at Gallery on the Pali is her first official one-woman exhibition. It showcases recent work in photography and painting. In her photography, Davis captures instants where plate glass or the surface of water unifies the immobile and the dynamic, a moment defined by fleeting intersections of open perception and focused attention. In a space between window shopping and photojournalism, accidental collisions of people and objects become charged with symbolic potential. In "Reflections in Northwestern Australia," water becomes sky, land becomes foreground, reflected branches become trees, and riverbed becomes cloudscape. Her photographs can function as icons for our era, marked as it is by our ability to produce photorealistic visual effects and bring light to a halt in the laboratory.

If reflection is one side of her current aesthetic coin, then darkness — or what it can reveal or shelter — is the other. Her wet-on-wet watercolor paintings are all executed while blindfolded. This technique (inspired by local artist George Wollard) began with her painting "in the dark, which frees you because you only have to work with values" and levels of contrast. Painting is reduced to gesture, and while blindfolded, she must base her decisions on nothing more than the degree to which she can subtly detect the location and density of the paint to be applied. It is a radically internal process that is linked to her use of self-portraiture.

She says she uses herself because she is "a willing, patient, and fully collaborative subject who is always ready when I am and who happens to go wherever I happen to be and who will behave on cue to whatever I command!" She calls the self-portraits "purely documentary ... utterly placeless." Nevertheless, they can easily conduct and channel academic discourses of globalism, feminism and migration. Created by an expert in contemporary communications, they also cannot help but respond to our online culture of narcissism as exemplified by sites such as MySpace and YouTube. One cannot help but consider what actually distinguishes an anonymous online travel journal from similar content presented formally as "fine" art. Davis is well aware of the increasingly arbitrary distinctions.

Nothing summarizes this play across borders better than the visual ethnography project she carried out in South Africa. Her photographs of a fantastic home built on the dreams of a rural Xhosa bishop show us the tangible results of a profound dedication to an individual vision. She has used these images in class to jolt students out of their typical understanding of the term "dream house." The bishop's home is a perfect balance of art and science, as he had to take a pure image and turn it into a high-fidelity (and architecturally sound) structure. For Davis, this shows how "art and science meet in the philosophy of how the brain works," and how a shared set of tools, techniques, skills and methods are grounded in similar theories of communication. Both art and science are valued for the consistency of their results and their ability to transform the terms and structures of life itself.

If you stand on your head and imagine Dineh Moghdam Davis' 20 years of teaching experience, wide-ranging and self-directed artistic career and global network of experts in diverse fields, then her position — a bird's eye view of the edge — makes perfect sense.

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.