A typical Hawai'i art-scene moment, characterized by preconceptions, established expectations and tight social circles: An older haole lady sweeps into Nu'uanu Gallery on opening night of "California Dreamin': LA to HI," appears to take in the entire show with a glance, heads straight to curator Deanna Miller and proclaims: "It's wonderful!"

To be fair, the woman's display — and my reaction to it — may have been more about the social event in itself. Appropriately, this encounter neatly illustrates the show's subliminal connections with a city that is nourished by social networks built upon the dreams of Hollywood, and represents all of California in most peoples' imaginations.

On the surface, the work of seven Los Angeles artists has little to do with the dreams of non- and marginalized Angelenos, with the L.A. that Hawai'i-based urban theorist Mike Davies calls the "City of Quartz," and that was visualized in Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner." Those versions of Los Angeles are megalopolises whose multiplicity of cultures and landscapes are subject to militarization and depersonalization by technology, private security services, gangs and the police. In short, the "real" L.A. is powered by the fact that it must control the geological, ecological and cultural forces that define it.

In this sense, Andy Moses' paintings are perfect and perhaps unwitting expressions of this "other" L.A. despite their ocean-themed titles. Moses spreads neon pigment across the canvas as if by zen squeegee. His technique sustains complex interactions of color and shape that easily evoke particulate-laden sunsets, Hollywood's blockbuster special effects, long photographic exposures of freeway traffic and passing street lights, and striated social groups "all just getting along."

Moses' linearity smartly gives way to the bold, black and white graphical puzzle of Charles Arnoldi's untitled acrylic work. It, too, can also be stripped of its abstract modernist camouflage and interpreted as an expression of L.A. The work is subdivided into smaller individual canvases bearing a similar pair of eye-mouths and contrasting bars of weathered black.

Arnoldi renders these forms to produce the impression of a fragmented black-white dialogue, unified by a masterful use of rotation and scale that balances conflict with proportions possibly inspired by the Golden Mean. One's eye is constantly carried from one "neighborhood" to another, with a constantly shifting sense of which form has the "upper hand." Is this the segregated dream of L.A. race relations before illegal immigration became a mainstream American political issue?

In "Blue," Ann Thornycroft plays out this dream even further, picking up on Arnoldi's grids and inverting the texture and axes of Moses' streaks. Through washes, spatters, drips and worn patches, she alternates flat sections of paint with thicker applications. These arc shapes look like water being swept from a windshield, disclosing highly emotional hot spots of red and yellow. Color-coded titles of Walter Mosley's detective novels set in post-War and segregated Los Angeles spring to mind: "Devil in a Blue Dress," "A Red Death," "Little Yellow Dog." Each of these novels was about journeys beneath L.A.'s surface along fault lines of class and race, and violent cultural tectonics.

Laddie John Dil's sculptures address these powers of landscape-shaping. His "Golden Cantilever" and "Untitled' are both alchemical works. Dil mixes various oxides into wet concrete and slices sections away as one would sculpt a cake. As these chemicals react and the concrete dries, dynamic patterns and textures organically emerge. The results are unmistakable references to the geology of the Los Angeles Basin: folded mountain ranges and its coastlines defined by ancient collapses and slides. Dil's works may be the truest and transcendent expressions of California on the whole, and not just products of a biographical process.

On one hand "California Dreamin' " is disconnected from an L.A. whose sharper realities of low-riders, race riots, plastic surgery, earthquakes, Disneyland, immigration crises and pornography clash with its "dream self." But who really cares? Like the bumper sticker says: "Slow down, this ain't the Mainland." However — and this may be the show's hidden lesson — artistically and culturally, L.A.'s split personality is analogous to Hawai'i's. A challenging legacy of colonialism, agricultural exploitation and military occupation lurks behind our facade of "paradise." We're sharing the dream. Isn't that wonderful?

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.