Walking into Kakaako’s SPF Projects, one is greeted by a huge mask made of untreated pine, suspended from the ceiling by heavy silver chains. Water pours down its cheeks and dribbles out of its mouth, draining into a square base adapted from a shipping crate. It is a sad and vaguely funny face, simple and raw in its aesthetic, proudly displaying its chisel marks, and the "primitive" rendering of holes for eyes, a slit for a mouth, and abstracted nostrils.

I asked Lawrence Seward if there was any ethnic representation in his piece, some kind of riff on Pacific cultures. He said "no," then thought for a moment and wryly added: "The ethnicity of Home Depot, I guess."

If one looks at the reverse side of the mask — there isn’t really a back since the face is carved from the perspective of the wearer — the problem-solving that went into the fountain’s plumbing is plainly visible. Seward’s pipes and hoses are precisely arranged and routed around supporting blocks of wood, which still bear rough calculations and notes in pencil.

It’s still a face, in some ways more functional as a mask when viewed from the "back" side than from the front.

This is the conceptual key to all of the pieces in the show, demonstrating the tension between the physical problem of pumping water or carefully balancing found objects, and the choices that go into doing so efficiently and aesthetically. Which side of art making is more important, or "meaningful"?

Though the strategy of presenting function, production and infrastructure is not a new strategy in contemporary art, seeing it deployed in the service of Hawaii-oriented themes generates some fresh results.

Seward invites viewers to invoke their personal cliches about beaches, tropical fish and indigenous cultures, then pushes them toward reconsideration thanks to a careful balance of craftsmanship and sloppiness, beauty and ugliness. This suspense is playful, not aggressive, cynical or negative, and bears comparison to the intentionally unrefined and insightfully humorous approach that Swiss art duo Fischli and Weiss often deployed.

Similarly, Seward’s photographs of improvised sculptures made from assembled beach trash turn the junk that goes into our oceans (and into his surf spots in particular) into aesthetic objects that the next high tide disassembles. If the viewer takes issue with the action and/or the results, well … exactly!

Though the gorgeous fish portraits done in collaboration with renowned Ghanaian custom coffin-maker Paa Joe technically aren’t found objects, Seward appropriates their core function — vehicles for the dead to reach the afterlife — and applies it to the ocean ecosystems that we celebrate. Since Paa Joe crafts fantastic coffins designed to reflect the passions of their occupants in life, aren’t our "dead reefs" worthy of the same respect?

The immediate threat to the fish is the tires we dump into the ocean, the plastic waste and the thousands of tons of molasses that spilled into Hono­lulu Harbor last September. This is why his faux reefs are made of styrofoam, the pedestals are made of junk, and there is candy in some of the little caskets. It’s delicious and restocked daily — unlike our fisheries.

Some will never respect, enjoy or recognize art made from everyday objects or the waste that our society produces; they like their art to come from some pure or perfect platonic (imaginary) dimension. However, for all of his dry humor, surfer cool and air of disinterest, Seward is pragmatic and surprisingly sensitive to his audience.

In this case, he is sketching a relationship between environment and the masks we wear to cope with the banality of our evil. This is the end of the rainbow, and it brings us back to the concept of self and identity that the crying fountain/mask expects the viewer to fill. We celebrate land, life and tradition as local heroes, but Seward reminds us that they are bound and defined by networks of communication and commerce that have their own strange beauty, revealed only if it is studied.

The show is far from didactic (neither Seward nor curator Drew Broderick are enamored by explanation), but not apolitical. Since his research is highly personalized — that’s one working definition of art making, after all — Seward might be considered an "ethnicity of one."