A pewa is a small piece of bowtie-shaped wood used to repair a crack in a bowl, and in this case the term evokes multilayered references to damage caused by accident or vandalism and ideas of conservation, reconnection, and improvisation and upcycling.

Presented in dialog with Maoli Arts Month events, "Pewa II: Remasculation and Human Seed-Ships" features new and recent work by Solomon Enos and Carl F. K. Pao at SPF Projects in Kakaako.

Downstairs, Pao presents multiple perspectives on ideas of Hawaiian masculinity, primarily articulated through missionary culture’s castration and mutilation of kii kupuna ancestral figures.

The left wall of the gallery features a huge kii made of brown felt, awaiting a visitor’s attempt to restore its manhood through the proper positioning of a red felt phallus. The felt evokes tourist kitsch, but the "pin the tail" game that it facilitates (complete with matching red blindfold) isn’t exactly funny.

Mounted on the wall to the left of the figure are three spare indigenous prosthetics, carved to look like they have only recently been removed from their owners … or perhaps hidden away for safe keeping. On the floor are several mock petroglyphs that Pao has carved into the concrete. Reimagining the penises that these iconic representations of Hawaiian culture once had undermines the facility with which they are deployed on coffee mugs, shot glasses and keychains.

Broadly, Pao is performing a "restoration" of Hawaiian masculinity that orbits the four-foot high blackened wood phallus at the center of the gallery’s first floor. Hand-carved, burnt a rich dark brown, and wandering between ideal and stylized, it bears multiple curving paths of pewa that suture wince-inducing wounds.

It condenses Pao’s argument, which is grounded in an excerpt of critical theory by University of Hawaii at Manoa Ethnic Studies and Anthropology professor Ty P. Kawika Tengan.

Tengan’s writing is reproduced in large vinyl letters on the wall opposite the felt kii. An excerpt: "symbolically restoring masculinity aids decolonization efforts, but not without a critique of the masculine performance that is doing the restoration."

Given that widely recognized icons of masculinity can be found in Hawaiian geography (here I am thinking of the Iao needle on Maui), and that shape-shifting of akua tend to blur and redistribute Western assignments of power to gender, the notion that Hawaiian males are being emasculated might raise a few feminist or queer eyebrows. However, a close reading of Tengan’s text may trace the outline of Pao’s tongue planted firmly in cheek.

In any case, Enos ups the ante of male sexual sublimation with nearly 100 drawings of the biotechnological systems that allow humans in his "Polyfantastica" science fiction epic to navigate intergalactic space. Called Human Seed-Ships, each is digitally printed on a manila envelope (echoing themes of dissemination), and depicts a unique expression of unspecified physiology.

Some are bilateral, others are radial, and not all of them are symmetrical, reflecting the types of bodily freedom that a zero-gravity interstellar existence might afford. Many of them, perhaps complementing the masculine theme downstairs, are vaguely vaginal.

Each drawing bears the energy and speed of Enos’ loose but precise lines and brushwork, as well as his powerful color sense derived from the comic arts.

The diversity of Enos’ designs is remarkable, and in his mythology of human dispersal it is heartening to see so many different kinds of open body plans. Though the milky, semi-transparent gesso that he has painted on the envelopes is a bit obvious, the force that scatters humans (we don’t know if it’s a body or just genetic material inside each seed) needn’t necessarily be gendered.

Enos’ "Polyfantastica" looks forward through an act of imagination that anticipates unleashed powers of genetic engineering, but anchors that transformation in Hawaiian values.

Though Pao’s project is a little more traditional in the way it tackles identity politics through art, he isn’t above a little social science fiction with his Post-Historic Museum of the Possible Aboriginal Hawaiian, the organization responsible for the petroglyphs. (Visitors can pay $5 to make rubbings of the petroglyphs.)

Taken together, these artists can be interpreted as a pewa strengthening a weakness in the cultural structure of contemporary Hawaiians, and as the crack itself — in this case, the viewer is encouraged to insert him or herself between them as a "fix."