Hiding things in plain sight

In a way it’s unfortunate that "Cella," Phoebe Cummings’ large-scale sculptural installation at the University of Hawaii Art Gallery, is supplemented by two video projections: one a time-lapse video of the project’s construction, and the other a slideshow of photographic stills that offers some insights into the production process. There was a time when a work like this, a careful and subtle expression of mass, weight and space, could simply stand — or in this case, hang — on its own without media crutches.

Here’s what you will see: a large, brown, organically textured structure suspended from the gallery ceiling by a system of cables. It could be made of mud. It could be made of fabric. It could be aa lava from Hawaii island. Lit from below, the snaking mass looks like a floating island.

With the art building’s bamboo forest visible through the windows behind it, the piece is roughly comparable to something one might have seen in "Avatar" or "Life of Pi."

A facilities guy walks into the gallery, asks the student on duty, "What’s this supposed to be?" "Whatever you want it to be," she replies, maybe a little embarrassed, maybe tired of answering this question. He chuckles. But don’t misunderstand me; the problem isn’t the work … it’s us.

"Cella" does not announce its meaning or scream its intent because it is monumental in character, like a slab from some druidic calendar, a sacred standing stone or the kind of rare mineral formation that ends up in a natural-history museum. This appears to be off-putting for most, but the work actually begs to be approached, and that’s when things get fascinating.

Everything about "Cella" changes when one opts for a more intimate study. Suddenly the sculpture is alive with clusters of threads that look as if a pasta maker extruded them. What could be the "mindless" product of termites is crash-zoomed into sophisticated human activity. What was once earth becomes (angel?) hair, an asteroid made of densely packed dreadlocks.

Maybe at this point the viewer will turn to the time-lapse footage and see humans scurrying around the gallery, applying material to a chicken-wire frame. Day turns to night in the movie, "Cella" grows like a wasp’s nest, and even though the video doesn’t really explain anything, some of the mystery is drained from the experience.

The danger here is that viewers will then think they "get it" because the video provides some minimal context for the alien object hanging in the gallery. I watched numerous people make a couple of orbits around the piece, spend 30 seconds in front of the projection and walk out.

Even knowing that "Cella" is hand-assembled and made of unfired clay (which for me conjures the entire history of humans making things, and an admiration for the material challenges Cummings and her assistants faced) does little if the piece’s combination of mass and apparent simplicity doesn’t dent our jaded viewing habits.

Don’t leave just yet, though. Walk around the structure again. Vary the amount of the work that gets into your eyes. First pretend you are in an airplane, and then the size of an ant, and then at the scale of a bacterium. Notice that the surface isn’t anywhere near uniform, repetitive or easy to perceive or summarize.

Punctuated by impressions of the fingers that assembled the work, "Cella" is almost superhumanly generous in the endless and evocative detail it provides the eye.

"Cella" is a Latin word for the inner area of a temple that houses the hidden image of a god; it is both a vault and a womb, and yes, "cellar" is the secular version.

Now one might ask, "What is this thing hiding?" or, "Is this the thing that is to be hidden?" Is it a cocoon or vessel of some sort? Or, perhaps the gallery space is the cella, and this structure is the image of the god itself … or something it left behind.

There are no pre-formulated answers, but an experience that can lead the viewer to ask these and other questions is well worth the effort.