Maoli Arts Alliance’s annual juried exhibition, “Contact,” marks its fifth installment this year. “Contact Zone” is by far the most pointedly critical to date.

“Contact Zone” co-curator/jurors Keola Naka‘ahiki Rapozo and Micheal Rooks tackled the challenges that come with any juried exhibition and negotiated the “contact zone” created by their respective experiences in lifestyle branding and curating contemporary art. Rapozo is the creative director and co-founder of clothing/lifestyle company Fitted Hawaii; Rooks, formerly of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is curator of modern and contemporary art at Atlanta’s High Museum.

Together they have managed to balance the specifics of the exhibition’s politics with the more general desires of a local fine arts community that has seen the number of open calls diminish over the years.

The results are diverse and wide-ranging, bringing together the conceptualism of luggage chained together as if the bags were refugees or shackled prisoners, the illegal urban realism of local street art, contemplative video installations and plenty of traditional painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing.

“CONTACT ZONE” is a very full show, where the works are all but forced to dialogue with each other. A given line of sight might combine a minimalist sculpture of stratified concrete, what appears to be a family of sacred ritual objects, and a Hawaiian Telecom phone booth half-buried in a pile of sand and fenced off by police tape that reads “NAPALM – END THIS HORROR.”

Everywhere is a persistent attempt to project some dimension of the unique way that Hawaii’s astounding generosity struggles, collides and at times collapses into its crises as its settlers, ecology, economy, climate, land and host culture interact.

The lack of titles or names to hint at the meaning or origin of the works makes the experience all the more subjective. Some visitors will immediately recognize the painting or printmaking of various 20th century Artists of Hawaii mainstays, while others will be drawn to a newer generation that has benefitted from HoMA’s shifts to a more focused or exclusive curatorial approach.

Whether one is attracted to a small fleet of voyaging canoes with newspaper excerpts for sails, a black skeletal structure that seems to pour itself out of one of the gallery’s partitions, or the enigmatic eroticism of tight blue jeans with a pineapple crown and what might be mango pulp crushed in a back pocket, the visitor is advised to make use of the document that collects all of the artists’ statements.

Contemporary art is, like a traditional cultural object, expected to “speak for itself” through its symbolism, formal qualities, and the creator’s demonstration of intelligence and mastery of materials. Such things are often only understood by initiates and insiders, so the booklet of accompanying narratives, explanations and short-form manifestoes adds a crucial layer of information.

How else would the visitor come to appreciate the multi-dimensional tragedy that is the Ala Wai Canal, or appreciate different ways that these artists have chosen to represent it: as a sarcastic invitation to bottle and slickly market its waters; a huge colorful map of the mental and material streams that feed it; or a physical boundary that has always contained the heart of Oahu’s identity crisis?

THIS YEAR the show boldly crosses the troubled and toxic Ala Wai to (re-)colonize Waikiki itself. Your mission begins at the lei stand occupying the corner of Lewers and Kalakaua. Pick up a map, and easily walk to hotel lobbies, galleria escalators, penthouse suites and high-end luxury stores.

In the heat of Oahu’s economic engine, “Contact Zone” artists have invoked the resilience of Hawaiian culture through sand sculpture and a massive Styrofoam ki‘i breaking its chains. They’ve borrowed the hand-prints of visitors and their lost vacation footage, and generally taken up the daunting task of engaging and mitigating the overwhelming aesthetics of synthetic aloha, duty free capitalism, and marketing Hawaiian authenticity.

I have always understood “Contact” to be about exposing the hidden, exploring misconceptions, and both dispelling and indicting ignorance. The idea was first approached through the experience of Native Hawaiians, but has since grown increasingly inclusive without losing this original cutting edge.

Ultimately, then, the project and the work it puts forward cannot be reduced to purely formal, material, cultural or political standards. That would be counter-productive, contradicting the expansive mission of the show itself.