Honolulu Advertiser, Sunday, August 10, 2008

By Jaimey Hamilton

"Eco/Logic," on display at The ARTS at Marks Garage, is an environmentally themed art exhibition coinciding with Hawaii Conservation Week. Its 31 artists address issues as global as peak oil and as local as the pollution on O'ahu's beaches, ultimately expressing the interconnectedness of our precarious ecological system.

The exhibition as a whole, like any with a socio-political theme, begs the question of how you address important concerns in art, on the one hand, without being overly didactic, or, on the other, wandering off into romantic idealism. What is the responsibility of art to disseminate information, set examples and raise visibility? No one wants to feel like they are being force-fed righteous perspectives. Yet neither can we deny the importance of art that reminds and incites us to change our everyday behaviors. There are no easy answers; in this show, some artists use dark humor, some go with more matter-of-fact statements, while others express solemn lament.

It was interesting to see that many artists, no matter what tone they were striving to achieve, were keen on constructing "warning signs" — art pieces in the form of gauges, instructions, or indicators that express our impact on the environment.

One of the funniest pieces in the show, "Mobile Warming: Tipping Point," by Chris Reiner, achieves a great balance between information and poetry. This pseudo-scientific instrument (typical of Reiner's "obtainium" — a word he uses to describe the cultural detritus he collects for his art), is set up as a scale, outfitted with a pan for ice on one side and a weight on the other. As the ice melts, the weight drops closer and closer to a frying pan sitting on the table, which is also filling up with the melted water. The piece is whimsical, dripping leagues and leagues of verbal and visual humor, and at the same time reminding us that, according to some statistics, sea levels have risen six to eight feet in the past 100 years.

Other warnings are sounded in a series of photographic vignettes by Hawkins Biggins. "Code Red," "Code Green" and "Code Blue" play off the Homeland Security threat level advising system.

Bruna Stude uses photographs to convey the disturbing absence of key indicator species. Her black and white underwater images capture beautiful, but empty, oceans.

The graphic simplicity and subtle irony of these two pieces are found in many others as well. Kirsten Rae Simonsen titled her drawing of a '70s-style car surrounded by a halo of fire "Peak Oil." She brings back pop artist Ed Rusha's deadpan humor to remind us that decades ago we already were ambivalent about how consumer car culture was affecting our world.

Similarly, Susan Maddux's small watercolor, entitled "Domesticated," shows a gas can that has grown the legs of a calf. The image plays off the current hyperbolic debate about our dependence on domestic and foreign oil. We keep talking about where we get our oil, all the while ignoring the more insidious ramifications of taming natural resources that don't recognize our national borders.

Of all the "warning signs" in the show, perhaps the most obvious and powerful is Gary Sweeney's "Civilization is an interlude between ice ages." This sentence is constructed of fragments of old signs, literally the debris of our urban jungle left to rust and reintegrate back into the earth. The obvious decay of the signs illustrates Sweeney's statement exactly. The text reminds me of an important leitmotif running throughout the show: that we humans need to think of ourselves as more integrated into an eco-logic.

The works do not simply illustrate that we have been horrible stewards of our environment (though we have) or that we need to recycle more in order to help preserve the Earth (though we do). They indicate that we should be fully aware of the complex knots with which we are bound to the ecology of this blue planet — so much for that simple circle with three arrows.

We are part of the problem and solution for sure. But even more fundamentally, we are quirky animals that have thrived in the earth's unique ecosystem, but have become arrogant enough to think that perhaps we are beyond its reach.

In fact, the most alarming prospect attached to our eroding environment is not that we will destroy the Earth (the Earth might yet survive us), but that we are making ourselves another extinct species, a blip in the vast scale of geologic and cosmic time.

The point is made visually in Vince Hazens' "Gecko Logic," a black and white abstraction composed of slide samples of gecko poop collected around his home. As in all of his work, Hazens' humor is spot on. In this case, it points to our mania for the most minute pieces of data that can sometimes leave us blind to the larger picture.

In a similar vein, Corine Kamiya's delicate, empty, collapsing birdcages constructed of vellum symbolically allude to our objectification of nature. The translucent material recalls the history of using processed animal hide to write out our observations about the world. The cages inspired me to ask how durable these systems of observation are in the grand scale of things. Aren't we ensnared in the logic of the cage as much as the birds?

Many artists in the show also made their discussion of environmental issues relevant to the context of cultural politics. Mike Takemoto's "Save the Dolphins, Harpoon a Jap II" constructs an enigmatic graphic language that sends mixed signals. He conflates two different slogans and images from two very different eras and contexts, one in the service of war and the other in the service of environmentalism. The confusion begs us to reconsider the nature of all propaganda.

Another great piece that interweaves cultural politics and nature is Clinton Haness' video, "Ecolokahi." Displayed on an eviscerated TV, this video collage, a la Robert Rauschenberg, overlays traditional hula and chants with images of the urbanization of Honolulu. Erections of high-rises and ship construction compete with the narratives about ocean and earth told simply through the motions of hands and feet. With hints of melancholy, it is a reminder that eco-logic could be as simple as recovering practices of malama 'aina, or taking care of the land.

While most of the pieces in the show concentrate on hot-button issues, interestingly, only a few really truly propose an "eco-logic" — a new, dynamic way of thinking of about how to live more sustainably. Most more readily point out the fallibility of our current logic in which, just to hit the point home, Greenland's business leaders can be excited about global warming because it has uncovered oil reserves that were once capped in ice.

Mat Kubo's piece, on the other hand, is one of the few in the exhibition that engages in an ethics of deep ecology. "ActionFunUrbanSurvivalism" documents the three weeks Kubo spent living off of only what he could hunt, grow, glean or trade. His actions demonstrate how to exist outside of our money economy, while also proposing an update of indigenous Hawaiian community and environmental interdependence. Viewers can come away knowing how potentially viable it could be to live from the support of the land and from each other on this island.

Of course, it would be different if we all had to do it at the same time, but Kubo's actions inspire the hope that we might start to give more value to the intangibles of environment and community, and less to the conveniences of prepared food and plastic bags.

Jaimey Hamilton is an assistant professor of contemporary art and critical theory at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.