Sean Connelly’s "Land Division" is a monument made of carefully selected, cleverly assembled, horizontally stacked lengths of strawberry guava that looms in the gallery under an approximation of moonlight. The work has presence and gravity, as the evidence of massively organized labor is difficult for the human imagination to reject.

Connelly is playing with the energies that make seductive standing stones, pyramids, heiau and skyscrapers: that combination of formal geometry, superhuman scale and the repeated fitting-together of smaller elements.

This kind of architectural language is about reverence and awe, whether it is being used to enshrine dead kings, raise the gods above the common folk, track the seasonal paths of astronomical objects, or efficiently stack millionaires on top of each other. Connelly has, through references to critical moments in Hawaiian history, computer-aided design and collaboration with local artists and volunteer labor, managed to reference all of these concepts simultaneously.

There is always a natural disconnect between a monumental construction’s attention-getting power and the complex narrative that inspired it. The question is whether this "who, how and why" mystery is tantalizing enough to draw the viewer in.

Entering the gallery, the viewer is presented with the east face of the sculpture, a wall of circular wooden cross-sections with enough variation in size to produce a kind of effervescence — or a case of the willies, if you’re vulnerable to random fever dream patterns of endless repetition.

The vertical slit that separates the sculpture into two masses is dramatic, and the angled cut through the constituent branches turns each one into a spearhead. This crack aligns with a wall graphic featuring a vertical line and a date, 7/11/1961, which marks the introduction of Hawaii’s modern system of classifying land as urban, agricultural or for conservation. To emphasize the relevance of this historic decision, Connelly has literally aligned this slit with the state Capitol, which would be visible if all barriers between it and the sculpture were removed.

This physical intersection between the abstract and the historic is the view onto the rest of the critical and ecological theory that informs "Land Division." Connelly is deeply concerned with transition points such as land classification in 1961, its privatization in 1848 (also represented by a wall graphic), and the 1925 introduction of strawberry guava.

This constellation of clues is summarized by a wall map of Oahu’s watersheds: the natural systems that generate and catch rain in the mountains, and return it to the ocean via streams.

The traditional ahupuaa system divided the land according to these streams, organizing what Connelly considers to be an urban system of population and resource management. Connelly’s urbanism is not about concrete, skyscrapers and highways per se, but the ways that land is used to support increased concentrations of people.

Seeing watersheds inverts the prioritization given to highways and population centers, and focuses attention on the Koolau and Waianae mountain ranges that are reflected in the two halves of Connelly’s sculpture. As the viewer orbits the sculpture, the shifting profiles and cross-sections of the branches create new topologies. A sheer face becomes a bulge, and a flat slanting plane turns into an abstraction of a mountain valley.

These representations of the island’s geography are clear, but their resolution is too low to convey the same sense of awe one feels when looking at the Koolau Mountains from the Windward side. There is near-infinite fractal detail in those epic vertical creases, with shadows on the vegetation and the day’s shifting light producing a depth that a circle of strawberry guava — as a kind of organic pixel — can never match.

Compared with the sharp intentionality of the slit between the sculpture’s two halves, the scooped shape in the western face and the bulge in the eastern one are somewhat crude. Each stick’s face is perpendicular to the floor, creating a stepped effect that reads like 1980s computer graphics. The clean modernism Connelly appears to be pursuing in the sculpture’s overall volume is limited by a lack of precision in the angles that each face requires to create the curved surfaces he is after.

Connelly’s critique of land use by using an invasive species is more than a pun, and like the sculpture itself, the contentious issue of sustainability in Hawaii has ugly and pretty sides, depending on one’s point of view.

But Connelly’s gestures: scouting, harvesting, cutting, piling, cleaning, shaping and painstakingly fitting, demonstrates that he is trying to transcend polemical arguments and direct our attention to the resources themselves.