The Location of Up and Down represents a series of new works, open-ended musings, and reflections on inherited value systems and established sources of knowledge. While varied in subject matter and approach to materials, this group of paintings revolves around a central device of verticality as related to values. 


 ‘up’: wispy, related to aspirations, unattainable truths, the end goal, beyond, Icarus, Wākea, sweet Chariot, acting against gravity, against oppression, against static quality, searching (innocent like looking at space through a telescope or sinister like Captain Cook), searching (innocent like bug antennae or destructive like The Telescope), where the dust scatters. 

 ‘down’: heavy, the weight of history, solid accessible dirt, the starting point, the known, the comfort in the reality of a rock or the threat of sinking, a stagnant understanding to escape from, the high value of reliability or the low value of being beneath, where a body wants to be after a honest day’s work, where the dust settles.

 

Different ideas related to values, certainty, and possibility of knowing are explored within individual paintings. In one case, a decaying cement structure leans forward, perhaps pointing to the future while Locals© slippers stand below, watching. In another, the highest point of the mountain fades away into an uncertain quantum field, while rocks used to make the paint are tied to the bottom of the painting, solid and captured. The paintings are made with a range of found and natural materials on a semi-transparent fabric and some are double-sided, lending themselves physically to the open-endedness of the narratives within the work. 

Aupuni Space, July - September 2024

stool teetering on the fabric of reality and everything itself

wood veneer, pencil, acrylic, rust from years of sharpening chisels, yarn on polycotton, oak shelf brackets

40”x48”

neck of the [palm whale eel waʻa]

plant dyes (māmaki, hau, pōpolo), rust solution, earth pigment, acrylic medium, sand, roofing sealant, lau niu midrib, eel skin (i think), coconut, ʻohe frame, hardware

40”x48”

broom

guava wood, lau niu midrib, hau cordage, paint, rocks, ʻohe

67”x9”x16”

a jump, the source

acrylic paint, plaster, glue, hand twisted hau cordage, rust solution on mesh fabric and douglas fir stretcher

40x48”

leaning ‘forward’, Locals© ask “YYYYYY”

Cement from a found half used bag of Hawaiian Cement©, sand from that lagoon in Waikīkī, earth pigment from up mauka, wood glue, roofing sealant on polycotton, cinderblock fragment stand

40”x48”x4”