The current exhibition at Kakaako’s SPF Projects focuses on Hono­lulu’s battered and beloved beauty, she who serves us everything from cheesecake to bloated rock icon theme bars, parrots, break dancers, pink hotels and labor-union protests — your life is empty without her — that’s right: Waikiki. The show is split between performance/installation artist Robert Reed and veteran photographer E.Y. Yanagi, and it is a balancing act between two mutually informative extremes.

The ground-floor space features five of Yanagi’s minimalist, abstract and thematically focused photographs. Shot in 1973 and described by the artist as almost entirely unrelated to the rest of his work, these black-and-white images are radical in their depiction of a depopulated Waikiki.

Yanagi presents a sterile tropical ghost town of concrete and plaster, where the humble housing of the early 1920s contrasts with the bulk of the late 1980s; both appear abandoned. Perhaps the cause of this final judgment, or rapture, or evacuation is documented in a striking photograph of a black hole in the sky, radiating spirals of shadows that trace the Golden Mean (the central point between two extremes).

Upstairs, however, is a spectacular architecture of PVC and light, a surrealist party built out of disposable leisure flotation devices and inflatable mascots. Frantic lasers and the orbiting reflections of disco balls constantly scribble upon this room-sized sculpture that evokes the makeshift shelters of the homeless on Waikiki beach.

When one steps inside this "shack," it only gets weirder as male and female blowup dolls, a saucy masked pineapple, an inverted set of mirrored legs and a three-dimensional caricature of Diamond Head slowly spin to a cut-up soundtrack that includes bits of David Bowie, Patti LaBelle, Madonna and the Eurythmics.

Collectively, it’s emptiness below and saturation above, candy color versus monochrome, drunkenness set against austerity.

Some will look at Reed’s installation and wonder how its junky excess can be considered art. These are the same people who look down on the gaudiness, sexuality, sloppiness, commercialism and wild performativity of Waikiki. Ever since its native population was removed, Waikiki has always been slouching toward tropical Vegas status, with the recent spectacular relaunch of DFS only reinscribing the pattern.

The place is a collage, as described in Reed’s ode to the district: "Wacky-kiki: The Queen of America," which reminds us that the rubber-wheeled trolley cars, silver-suited men, Polynesian magic shows and Kuhio streetwalkers that swirl around the Duke Kaha­na­moku statue are here to stay.

What, then, is the best way to actually talk about what Waikiki is, was or might become? The entire job of art is to take over where the relatively tame parameters of its neighborhood association run out of ideas, and this is what makes pairing Reed with Yanagi so successful.

Yanagi laughs at how curator Drew Broderick looked at his work from this period, which is focused on people, and intentionally selected images that spoke through architecture and limited landscape. Yanagi is aware of the precise flavor of irony that Broderick was distilling, especially when reflecting on the image of a plastic-wrapped cocktail or tourist trinket hut that appears abandoned in an alley.

In the folds of the plastic, one can imagine the ghostly silhouette of a woman, and Yanagi stated that the image would be "perfect" if it included a stereotypical hula mannequin. But to me this misses the point because Broderick has filtered the kitsch out of Waikiki through Yanagi’s images of a crippled ahupuaa and long-gone apartment complexes, and funneled it into Reed’s upstairs space.

It’s quite a magic trick, really, to select one artist’s work for its absence of color and life, and use that of another to invoke a concept that neither necessarily had in mind.

One gets the sense that Reed could spawn forever (like the ABC stores from which he probably sourced the majority of his materials) and fill the space with his runaway revelry. Reed goes in one direction while Yanagi goes in the other. It is the vacuum they leave behind, a space shaped by common differences (rather than intersections), that the viewer is expected to occupy and fill.