Visual artists highlighted in juried exhibit

While it was difficult to write about the Honolulu Museum of Arts’ "Artists of Hawaii" juried exhibit when it featured 100 participants, it’s even more challenging to write about this handpicked group of eight, because less really is more.

Most work in the show was produced during the nine months that followed the artists’ selection from a pool of 249 applicants by museum director Stephan Jost, deputy director Allison Wong and contemporary art curator James Jensen.

Through this new format, we are reminded of Hawaii’s world-class reserve of talent, vision and technical mastery. Artists produce a greater number of pieces that in turn will be subject to greater scrutiny, thereby emphasizing strengths and revealing weaknesses.

The exhibit features the work of printmakers Lauren Trangmar and .5ppi (an artist collective that produces site-specific printmaking installations), photographers Allison Beste and Elisa Chang, multimedia artists Jesse Houlding and Maile Yawata, and painters Akira Iha and Emily McIlroy.

.5ppi’s section of the gallery is wallpapered with their signature pixel composition language, but a video is the core of their project. This fixed frame "stacks" their herculean mosaics in the fourth dimension of time and motion, straddling multiple genres that include optical art, experimental expressionist film and animated gifs. Accompanied by a minimalist soundtrack, this is a natural move for them to make as they explore all the possibilities of their self-imposed aesthetic constraints.

Though this iteration of their efforts lacks the dimension of public participation — a medium in itself for .5ppi — a free iPhone app, which filters photographs through their low-fi but richly textured aesthetic, makes up for that absence.

The public plays a different role in Chang’s photographs. All but invading the privacy of her subjects, Waikiki tourists, Chang presents a series of largely unflattering portraits of people who look lost, uncomfortable, reluctant, indifferent, distracted … everything but "happy" in the way tourism officials promote the experience of Hawaii.

Presented in a continuous Instagram-like strip, the moments Chang has collected are not ones that these people would necessarily want to remember. And though something heroic may be lost in the thematic repetition and close grouping of the images, Chang’s project is a gateway to considering how any of us might look when caught off guard and outside of our "natural" environment.

Houlding negotiates with invisible forces such as magnetism and gravity, devising clever ways for semiautonomous processes to produce highly aesthetic patterns.

"Truck Drawing" is a map or data visualization that uses a printing plate sized to his truck bed and inked with scarlet, a large sheet of paper, a shot put and a set of Big Island errands to run.

The resulting complex grid of arcs, slashes and punctuations, bounded by a wide hourglass shape, reflects every start, turn and stop of Houlding’s journey. The work leans toward being read instead of appreciated, as the viewer wonders exactly what sequence of turns or bumps produced this web of expressive curves.

Exploring personal dimensions of loss, painter McIlroy’s work modulates surrealism, expressionism and naturalism. The eye wades through evocations of internal organs, flowers, feathers and anemone, the moisture and textures of living biology mapped to emotional states.

Smaller works contextualize the monumental epic that is "Sky Burial," which represents the best-balanced collection of pieces in the show. Referencing the Tibetan funerary practice that leaves bodies to be quickly recycled by vultures, McIlroy’s painting mixes scale, ecologies and species to bridge dreams and meditative reflection in an intensely immersive experience.

Trangmar uses a personal, reflexive encyclopedia of symbols expressed through traditional and contemporary production practices. Each painstakingly produced print, plus two maps and a hand-printed book, are steeped in Victorian and European Medieval anachronism, and the tradition of scientific illustration.

These simulated, meticulous and well-researched works collage astrology, human anatomy and technology. Though presented in gold frames that distract from these exquisite forgeries, the works nevertheless inspire and confound.

In a take on manual reproduction that appears mechanical, veteran painter Iha’s set of highly formal, somewhat interchangeable, labor-intensive paintings are variations on a dominant field of blue crisscrossed by thin red lines and bounded by zones of weathered white.

Iha is inspired by the light, architecture and embodiment of time’s passage in Japanese and Okinawan Zen temples. His paintings could be views looking through windows or down on maps, depending on the perspective the viewer chooses.

Beste’s photographs are tricky. They at first appear to feature banal sunsets with illuminated clouds hovering above the hard gray line of the ocean’s horizon. But that view is turned uncanny by twin sunsets that are actually the glow of distant oil tankers off the coast of Oahu.

In some examples the ships’ lights are in focus, but in others, longer exposures smear them into an allegory that maps the idea of artificial sunsets onto our fossil-fuel dependence. This irony is enriched by a grid of free postcard versions that have been immensely popular with visitors.

Like Chang’s, Beste’s section may have benefited from contrasting these photographs with blown-up versions of selected images.

Yawata’s multimedia installation mixes scale and depth, diorama and photograph, drawing the viewer into a comic book world of gangsters, hip youth, anthropomorphic radishes, femmes fatale and … is that Thanos and Spawn in a battle royal taking place somewhere in Kaimuki?

Read left to right, these are the adventures of personas such as Sum Gum Gai, Bad Perm, Daikonderoga and Brock Obara. Richly characterized and built around a universe of puns and Japanese (pop) culture, Yawata provides narrative clues, inviting the audience to create their own means of bringing it together.

Though assessing the significance and quality of a work is always a matter of personal taste and individual effort, it is safe to say that "Artists of Hawaii 2015" is easily digestible and free of controversy.

Perhaps our artists are negotiating the economic and ecological uncertainty of life in contemporary Hawaii by immersing themselves in the labor of intensive production and research.

Hopefully the audience is inspired to do the same.