"Makawalu: The Watchful," a group show of Native Hawaiian artists at The ARTS at Marks Garage, is a strong start to Maoli Arts Month 2008. The exhibition provides a critical context of what it means to be observant of Hawaiian culture at the present moment, and it complements the month's events highlighting Hawaiian arts, craft and culture.

"Makawalu," meaning eight pairs of eyes, is figuratively translated by one of the artists in the show, Meleanna Meyer, to mean multiple, divergent, provocative and compelling perspectives on issues surrounding Hawaiian culture and its customary practices. As with Meyer's "Na Maka Hohonu — Deepest eyes," an acrylic painting, all of the pieces in the show implicitly cast their watchful eyes toward Hawaiian culture's sometimes precarious coexistence with the consumer and media culture of globalization. Many of the artists express this by creating pieces that play with the metaphor of spatial voids as pathways of visibility. That is, they leave open to interpretation who is looking and where that looking is, and what that looking means.

Nets, holes and ellipses are used throughout to create portals in which all kinds of perspectives mingle. Views from the past and the present converge, the time of the gods and the time of humans meet, lived experience and fantasy come into contradiction, and the observed and the observer roles are often called into question. I really appreciated the complexity of these visual statements and the way that they engaged me in taking responsibility for the preservation of the unique cultural and natural environment of Hawai'i and realizing its connection to histories the world over.

GROWING CULTURE LIKE A TREE

Rocky Ka'iouliokahihikolo Jensen, Mark Chai, and Bob Freitas all conveyed these sentiments in the metaphoric possibilities of wood. Each of their pieces suggested that our ability to appreciate the slow sinuous growth of culture, like a tree, will lead to an ongoing renewal of Hawaiian culture in the future.

Freitas presented a series of smaller abstract sculptures that often conveyed a complementary dialectic between the past and future, preservation and change.

Jensen, cofounder and director of Hala Haua III, the society of Hawaiian arts, contributed an abstract wooden figurative sculpture of Hina, who holds a circular shell that reads as both the moon and as another eye. Through the space between her uplifted arms the viewer also gains access beyond the sculpture. This combination of perspectives indicates all the multiple places from which vision must manifest in order to achieve anything close to total awareness of our differing, but collective, responsibility to Hawaiian traditions.

Mark Chai's piece, "Na Waimaka o Ka Lani — The Tears of Heaven," conveyed a similar sentiment in its use of a spherical orb that floated in space. This beautiful light plywood construction with swirling openings could be read as both a revolving earth and as multiple eye/portals through which to view our understanding of Haumea, the Earth Mother. A blond tree branch penetrates and seems to grow through the floating orb, acting as a visual metaphor for the roots and growth of Hawaiian culture.

The title of the piece, in combination with the tree branch, also refers to the stream where Captain Cook is believed to have first set foot on the island of Kaua'i. In this bit of recovered history, there is a recognition of the exploitation of Hawai'i's natural resources that have come with the forces of colonization. This reminder is also at the heart of Imaikalani Kalahele's assemblage piece, built with debris apparently washed up onto Hawai'i's coastline.

VISIBILITY AND PERCEPTION

Abigail Lee Kahilikia Romanchak's "Papa Ku," three floating wood-stained paper half-crescents (reminiscent of 'ahu'ula) flecked with small holes, continue to explore the notion of visibility through the creation of space.

While royal Hawaiian cloaks are usually covered in the brilliant red feathers of the 'i'iwi or the yellow feathers of the mamo, Romanchak's piece refers to the netting structure used as support for the feathers. What is usually invisible is not only made visible in her work, but also acts as a screen through which to view the rest of the world. Through the holes, our thoughts and perspectives, literally of the contemporary reality beyond the window of Marks Garage, are variously obscured and brought into focus.

Maile Andrade adds to this metaphor in her use of projection in "Maka 'Upena Pupu." This is a multimedia work that consists of serigraph prints of netting onto which 40 Hawaiian eyes (ever changing, but always in the same place) are digitally projected. This piece asks us to consider who is doing the watching. Deconstructing the history of colonial representation, which tends to objectify and exoticize Hawaiian bodies, Andrade strategically denies us access to the faces. Instead, as we look upon these disembodied eyes, they also meet our gaze.

The fact that these images are projected onto the net, rather than layered behind it, is important. Instead of creating a boundary between those who are captured by the gaze and those who are watching, the net acts as a variable, haunting space in which it is not clear who is in control of representation. The complicated layers of projection and perspective in the piece instill a useful uncertainty in each viewer.

This play on visibility and observation is also found in the silver gelatin collages of Kapulani Landgraf. In the center of "O'o," for instance, there is a white space of the volcano — a void that also acts as the eye of the earth staring back at us. Around the upper rim, Landgraf has collaged little heads from photographs of Lono sticks that also act as little eyeballs. Here the gazes of the sky father and earth mother meet. Along the bottom, Landgraf has also added cutouts of astronomy observatories that are yet more eyes. These are pierced through and attached to the volcano with wana spines. Her playful visual puns of "o'o" (to poke or pierce) have refreshing feminist and post-colonial undertones that call into question whose penetrating gaze is piercing whose.

KNOWLEDGE AND ITS WORTH

This also begs the question of the difference between information and knowledge, and between observation and watchfulness, as it juxtaposes the high-powered scientific gaze of the telescopes that dot the volcanic landscape of the Big Island and Maui against references to ancient Polynesian systems of visibility and navigation. One of the questions it poses for me is this: What good does technology do when we don't know how to use it in a way that will preserve, rather than destroy, the earth?

Maika'i Tubbs, the youngest of the artists included in the show, has a number of pieces in the show that sculpt old texts about Hawai'i, including "Land and Power in Hawaii" by George Cooper and Gavin Daws and the classic coffee-table book, "The Hawaiians," in a way that literally cuts into their languages and perspectives. In "Next Show in Fifteen Minutes," for example, he transforms the exoticized images of Hawaiian culture found in "The Hawaiians" into a semicircular circus tent. The pages, like the nets of Maile Andrade's work, are constructed to provide spaces in between these spectacular representations through which new questions and perspectives on Hawaiian culture can be formulated.

These artists are not only asking me to be mindful of a tumultuous past, but are also encouraging me to pay attention to the way that seemingly invisible spaces also act as alternative vistas from which to see a potential future.