The art of sculpture manipulates our ability to sense presence in a way usually reserved for people and places. Sculpture triggers some of our most ancient reflexes — those established when spirits lived in trees, rivers and stones, and we lived "in" the land and not simply "off of" or "on" it.

Though recent works by O'ahu-based painters Aiko Kameya, Takeo Miji and San Jose, Calif.-based sculptor Randy Shiroma are done a great injustice by being crowded into the stepchild of a presentation space that is The Academy Art Center at Linekona's second-floor "gallery," they nevertheless invite a return to this deeper way of looking at the world.

Kameya, Miji and Shiroma all deal in the intricacies and emotions of surfaces, landscapes and processes. They do so at dizzying heights of abstraction that — as they strip us of things we might readily recognize — refrain from tossing us into chaos. Taken together, these works are about various boundaries: between painting and sculpture, between figures and functions, between invocation and evocation.

Shiroma's terrazzo sculptures can be simultaneously read in terms of architecture, ruin and ritual. The vertical flows of his columnar pieces ("Navel of the Earth" and "As Above So Below") evoke supermodel-lithe Egyptian royal sculptures and the broken legs of colossi from some lost Pacific civilization. His egglike pieces ("Clear Water White Mountain", "Long Mountain Tall Tree") remind one of discarded wrecking balls, ancient totems or mysterious land markers that would be at home in Hayao Miyazaki's animated film "Spirited Away."

All of the works have an enigmatic, empty, facial aspect to them that appears to conceal great power. The columns might (still) be broadcasting or scanning, while the eggs might suddenly open at the seams and release who knows what from an ancient future?

Shiroma's production technique involves applying multiple layers of differently colored and textured concrete over a metal "skeleton" and then selectively eroding and cutting away different sections. New colors and textures are revealing at various depths, creating a 3-D narrative of mechanical, chemical and biological events. What emerges from this undoubtedly hazardous process (imagine the flying shards and the choking dust!) is a richly detailed evocation of unimaginably patient natural processes scaled down to a human attention span.

Shiroma's pieces anchor the show with Kameya and Miji establishing a dense "backup chorus." Clearly the viewer is meant to draw practical and conceptual connections between Shiroma and the painters, who work with heavily and densely layered applications that often qualify as "shallow" sculptures.

They, too, invoke the powers of land, sea and weather from the truly complex and constantly shifting interactions of blue that produce the impression of deepening ocean in Kameya's "Untitled 2005" and Miji's "Brambles," which is obviously not a bush but cannot be anything else when seen from a certain distance.

Neither Kameya nor Miji create "easy" images, as many resist photography in an admirable fashion. They, like Shiroma's "traditional" sculptures, should be experienced directly.

Viewed close up, Miji's "Darkside" and "Lagoon" present a frozen surface of layered color shaped into peaks and chasms that come to life when viewed from afar. His paintings are as overwhelming but no more random than a Big Island lava field or the industrial wreckage that characterizes the beach at Sand Island.

The show could have benefited from fewer paintings as a means to balance the physicality of the sculptures, reinforce the direct connections between the two media, and allow the works to serve as composed backgrounds for one another. At the same time, with walls that are half-paneled in wood, broken by hallways to the art center's wings, and dominated by white banisters, the space must be filled to signify that this is actually a space for contemplating art and not simply one that happens to be decorated with it.

The works of Kameya, Miji and Shiroma are cultural artifacts representing the culmination of significant amounts of human labor, but they are also compelling scale models of nature. The viewer is invited to lose and renew their vision in the give-and-take between individual gestures: brush strokes, traces of sandblasting, cuts of saw blade and the overall impressions of territory, form and texture. This is the same effect one gets when watching the details of a landscape shift while landing or taking off in a plane.

Spending some time with these works is worth it, so long as we are willing to visit and absorb their effects in a space that was never really meant to be lingered in.

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.