Now in its third decade, the 2014 Pacific States Biennial National Print Exhibition has brought together dozens of works submitted by artists from all over the United States. Inaugurated by the late art professor Wayne A. Miyamoto, this juried exhibition continues a dedicated effort to present University of Hawaii-Hilo students and community members with a diverse sampling of exemplary works of fine-art printmaking.

This year’s juror was renowned multimedia artist Willie Cole, who in his statement acknowledges that "art production is a difficult task, even when it seems or looks easy," but also takes the responsibility of judgment seriously. Internationally recognized for innovative techniques such as "scorch drawing" with hot flatirons, and crafting highly evocative sculptures with upcycled shoes and other consumer items, Cole is in a strong position to recognize similarly inventive efforts when he sees them.

Cole began by selecting pieces that triggered a "gut or visceral reaction," and then refined the pool by looking for works that told a story, were aesthetically sound, and creative in terms of technique and content. Populated by scenes of conflict and struggle, hybrids of life and machine, threatening landscapes, brooding architectural spaces, highly stylized human figures, veiled references to contemporary fears, and energetic (but dangerous-looking) abstractions, the result is a show that leans toward the melancholy end of the emotional spectrum.

Artists such as Clifton Riley of Houston and Karinna Gomez from Fairbanks, Alaska, present two readings of landscape and the built environment. Gomez’s "Forest Substation" is a mezzotint that depicts the skeletal architecture of an electrical substation in a forest. Set at night (the subtle difference between sky and trees masterfully achieved), the artificial structure glows with the grain of a night-vision camera, strongly contrasting in color and form with the shadows of the organic background.

Riley’s "The Rising 55" combines lithography, intaglio and relief printing techniques to create a shattered cityscape of finely etched facades, detailed X-ray floor plans, and aerial views that mingle various periods of architecture. Expressionist gestures of ink and layers of texture add energy to what could be a process of birth, demolition or radical reconstruction.

Sharon Navage of Odessa, Texas, creates a similar imploding field of collage-oriented techniques with "Things Remembered," a lithograph and chine collé (a technique using fine, detail-sensitive papers). Dominated by the gray-brown tones of old photographs, Navage combines samples from vintage print advertisements with photo-based images of tea cups, crumbling doll parts, flowers, landscapes and old newspapers.

Viewers might associate Navage’s print with the surrealism of occult-leaning crime-drama title sequences, or the jittering in-and-out-of-focus "gothic carnival" music videos of the 1990s. However, when considered with similarly brooding works such as Riley’s "The Rising 55," and artist Keegan Adams’ "Type 1 Ritual," one can follow some of juror Cole’s logic.

"Type 1 Ritual" is a stormy composition of male torsos and limbs that first appear to be dance-related but resolve as moments of insulin self-administration. That moment of recognition is subtle but dense, and unmistakably touching, thereby transforming the Bloomington, Ind., artist’s abstract splash marks, drips and painterly brush strokes into additional layers of biological intimacy.

Daniel Ogletree’s "I Am A Good Worker" is a powerful critique of the body’s embeddedness in technical and economic systems. The Knoxville, Tenn., artist’s piece simultaneously evokes the diagram-driven explanations of Diderot’s 18th-century "Encyclopédie" and cartoonist Rube Goldberg’s devices of exaggerated complexity and mundane purpose. The worker in this mini-dystopia is represented by a pair of amputated hands, one punching a timecard, the other receiving medications whose administration is tied to use of the machine itself. Various arrows indicate directions of force: turning, insertion, depression, adjustment and flow, which mingle causes and effects that are both mechanical, biological and emotional.

The works discussed here should serve as waymarks for navigating the rest of the show, not its master narrative. For all of its moodiness, complexity and portrayals of struggle, haunting and negotiation, the show is far from morose or depressing.

I think Cole responded to a current of human realism that he found running through all the works, one that resonates with his own efforts to address the human condition without resorting to polemics or sacrificing the spiritual value of the art-making process itself.

Given the ongoing and specific relationship that Hawaii’s artists have with the hard realities of political, environmental and cultural issues, this exposure to outside efforts should be taken advantage of.