A new show with an intriguing cross-disciplinary concept, “Art/Sci 2016: Where Art and Science Meet,” is being presented by Honolulu Printmakers in the Mezzanine Gallery of the Honolulu Museum of Art School. It features the collaborations of 20 individuals working in 10 pairs, each matching a printmaker with a scientist from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, with the artist visually interpreting the scientist’s research work.

The project was seeded by printmaker Margo Vitarelli and coral reef scientist Mark Hixon. Vitarelli, inspired by a talk that Hixon gave at the Waikiki Aquarium, sent him a print of a parrotfish. Together they decided to explore how an integration of the two fields might “help change the world for the better.”

Although it is by no means always easy for artists and scientists to sit down and have a dialogue, the show works, on the whole. Printmaker Vince Hazen states that both groups are, “at their core, seekers of truth,” and though that might be debatable, the sentiment makes for reasonable grounds where the two parties can meet.

Nevertheless, there are gaps in language and presentation. The artists’ prints are framed and formally presented, while most of the scientists’ results-driven, unframed, explanatory displays suffer from poor graphic and informational design that creates a sometimes distracting science fair vibe.

For example, Elizabeth Nakoa’s impressionistic, relief print map of the Kuroshio Extension (a powerful trans-Pacific ocean current that originates near Japan) captures much of the turbulence and dynamics that researcher Niklas Schneider’s visualized data plots actually seem to obscure.

Yet his evocative description of this ocean current moving “like smoke from a cigarette” demonstrates an aesthetic and conceptual resonance between them. It is in these evocative moments — often described by one collaborator or the other in wall text — moving between art and science that metaphor comes alive.

We see this happen again in the “dark matter” collaboration between Hazen and scientist Sven Vahsen, from whom we learn that scientists are directly aware of only 5 percent of the energy in the universe because it interacts with light. His didactics (among the most coherent in the show, along with Megan Porter’s periodic table of endangered species and Celia Smith’s “Biology of Limu Kala in Waikiki”) summarize how dark energy might be detected by observing its interaction with atomic nuclei.

Vahsen’s display includes a chunky-looking three-dimensional computer graphic that represents the collision of a dark matter particle, known as a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle), and an atomic nucleus. Hazen’s accompanying screen print clarifies the whole idea magnificently, presenting individual, crisply delineated colored boxes representing degrees of energy in some tiny volume unit of space-time.

Along similar lines, Regina Bode’s print “Networking” responds to Greta Aeby’s coral health research by comparing and combining the structure of the human brain with that of coral, and Pratisha Budhiraja’s “Mano Wai,” a grid of stylized seeds, atoms, petroglyphs and circuit boards, responds to Camilo Mora’s “Carbon Neutrality Challenge.”

In perhaps the most effective synthesis of perspectives in the show, artist Deborah Nehmad’s dark grid of nucleic acids is paired with scientist Megan Porter in a comment on species extinction from each participant’s perspective. Porter’s digital print features row after row of endangered species’ silhouettes, with the red shadow of a Hawaiian crow echoed in a blood droplet that stains one of Nehmad’s boxes.

Art has always served science, and many scientists of old were also artists. Keeping in mind that the viewer is meant to assess the visual qualities of both participants’ contributions as they form a joint statement, the refreshed intersections of “Art/Sci“ could be seen as a strong debut of what would be a rewarding annual show.