‘Iolani Gallery
Windward Community College, Oahu
March 15 – May 3, 2013
Opening Reception: March 15, 4-7pm

Invited Artists: Mark Chai, Maura Fujihira, Keiko Hatano, Sally Lundburg, Mary Mitsuda, Chusak Majarone, Deanna Itano, and Kamaili Puaoi – Sponsored by Fishcake

Gallery Hours 1-8pm, Monday and Tuesday / 1-5pm, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday / closed Saturdays

Signal Fire (In Times Like These) – mixed media, 72″ x x 72″ x 60″ – Sally Lundburg

Cycles of Life
The Donkey Mill Art Center
Holualoa, Hawaii
February 12 until April 6, 2013
Artist Reception: April 21

The concept for this exhibition is inspired by the work of Holly Roberts and Tip Toland, two of Donkey Mill Art Center’s 2013 Laila Twigg-Smith artists-in-residence. Both artists use personal patterns, symbols, and images to create visual manifestations of interior dialogues. Other artists in this exhibition include Gerald Lucena, Margo Ray, Scott Yoel, Jacob Medina, Rod Cameron, Sally Lundburg, Amber Aguirre, Lee Ballard, Esther Shimazu and Elizabeth Alexander.

The show will challenge the viewer to interpret the content of narrative present in the work as they are drawn into the tales woven by selected artists working in print, painting, ceramic, and multi-media. Visitors are invited to consider the importance of story telling, of self-representation in art, and of the role that narrative plays in defining the individual, culture, and personal perspective through the vehicle of human emotion.

Link to: The Donkey Mill Art Center

cordwood – mixed media & koa logs, dimensions variable – Sally Lundburg

Maui Arts and Cultural Center
January 27 – March 30
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 26

The forest is a refuge, resource and inspiration. We invited accomplished artists and craftsmen from around the state to see how they would perceive and express new ideas on this theme, encouraging investigation of contemporary art-making from conservative to complex. The exhibition outcome will raise public awareness and spark dialog with traditional and non-traditional works in painting, sculpture, furniture, installation, film and poetry.

Invited Artists: Tom Calhoun, Cudra Clover, Shaun Fleming, Mats Fogelvik, Ditmar Hoerl, Shingo Honda, Kirk Kurokawa, Tai Lake, Stephen U. Lang, Robert Lober, Terry Lopez, Sally Lundburg, Wilma Nakamura, Peter Naramore, Chris Reiner, Kirsten Rae Simonsen, Ricardo Vasquez, Jay Warner, Linda Whittemore and Scott Yoell

For more info and images of the show, link to AGGROculture Collective

Below is the installation I created for the show using koa branches, zip ties & video. The work is titled, If I Were a Hurricane.

If I Were a Hurricane from Mahi'ai Creative on Vimeo.

Show runs June 29-July 28, 2012
Opening Reception at Manifest- Friday June 29 , 5-9pm
32 North Hotel Street
Honolulu, HI 96817

Amalgamate is part of the Find Art Festival happening this week in Honolulu, “reconfiguring Chinatown into a wonderland of family, music, art and craftivism.” FIND ART brings visiting established artists and musicians into a creative mashup with their local peers and the public. The mix includes five contemporary visual artists from the mainland who emphasize community involvement in their work. In addition, four local artists will engage with and “play” with public space and the public in general.
Click here to see a full schedule of events.

Below (and above) are my works that were chosen for Amalgamate – Invader, Adaptor, Avoider, a series of photographs where the landscape has been altered to include portraits of men, women and children. As i walk the land and plan these modifications/adaptations/hybridizations), intertwining own real and imaginary genealogy, I reflect on Hawaii’s history of ecological and social invasion and a cultural landscape that is till shifting today.

invader,adapter,avoider (1 pile) - 48"x 32", archival inkjet print,(2012)

invader,adapter,avoider (1 log) - 36" x 24", archival inkjet print, (2012)

Provocative Hawai’ian

BY Leslie Mehren | May 3, 2012

Keith Tallett and Sally Lundburg are two vibrant Hawai’ian artists whose life and work gracefully intertwine. Partners in the truest sense of the word, they maintain individual styles and influences, yet create from a confluence of shared experiences and constant dialogue. Although both artists reference Hawai’ian culture in their art, they shun the notion of being relevant in a merely regional context. They prefer to see themselves as part of the larger conversation surrounding contemporary art while relating to issues that are particularly relevant to Hawai’i today.

Citing artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Donald Judd, who fled urban life for distant locales in the American west, the couple found the freedom to continue their art practice in the remote calm of a Big Island farmhouse. After years of living in San Francisco, earning degrees at the San Francisco Art Institute and participating in a lively arts community, they chose to return to Hawai’i before the birth of their daughter, Kia’i. It wasn’t just the surfing that brought them home. They knew they were building a future and could strike the right balance for their careers.

Both artists agree that Keith’s work is the more overtly Hawai’ian, with its inclusion of Polynesian tattoo patterns, tiki imagery and pidgin words emblazoned across tropical fruits and flowers. Keith blatantly challenges the notion of what it means to call something Hawai’ian, even something as seemingly innocuous as a guava fruit. The ubiquitous guava is not indigenous to Hawai’i, but was imported and allowed to become an invasive species on the islands. To Keith, it represents the kind of falsified culture imposed on Hawai’i by outside influences and assumed to be authentic. The image of a guava inked with Gothic pidgin slang could easily be interpreted as a self-portrait, a reflection on the artist’s own struggle with his identity and the terms that others try to pin on him.

As both a practicing Polynesian tattoo artist and a second-generation surfboard shaper, Keith is reviving awareness of Hawai’i’s diverse art traditions. He recently began handcarving traditional surfboards, called papahe’enalu, from native woods. Last year he was awarded a Cultural Apprenticeship Grant from the Folk Art Program of the Hawai’i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. This grant will enable him to study with Tom Pohaku Keali’iahonui Stone in a project titled Pae Ka Nalu – Traditional Wood Board Building. “I’d been building boards from all kinds of materials,” said Keith, “including stuff that was going to the dump and things from Home Depot.” Some people questioned whether those boards could really be considered papahe’enalu, but for Keith it was all valid in the context of advancing the craft.

Defining Keith’s artwork in formal terms is nearly as tricky as inking a ripe guava. His painting, sculpture and iconography have evolved over the last two decades into an amalgam of Hawai’ian culture packaged with razor-edged wit and conceptual art theory. Observing contemporary life and paying homage to his roots, Keith straddles two distinct worlds with complete ease. No matter if he is shaping a surfboard, executing an intricate tattoo design, or patterning a series of canvases with layered tire treads, his work is on-point, articulate and original.

If there is a meeting point for the two artists, it is in their willingness to adopt new materials and methods to meet their needs. Sally’s focus began with photography, film and video, but she has migrated into installation work, including wood logs and nests of twine and branches into her piece titled “the disappearing place” at the 2012 Biennial of Hawai’i Artists at Oahu’s Honolulu Museum of Art. For that groundbreaking installation, Sally received the Ellen Choy Craig Award, which is given annually to an Hawai’ian artist of exceptional merit. “Sally is fearless,” says Keith. “She has an idea, attacks it and if it fails she still makes something good come from it.”

Hawai’i’s richly layered ecosystem inspired Sally’s series, “Epiphytes and Invasives.” The series examines parallels between the social development of post-contact Hawai’i and processes of adaptation in nature. Epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants, abound in rainforests, as can non-native species when left unchecked. Immigrants and natives, invaders and adapters, all run through Sally’s imagery. The intersection of diverse lifeforms melds with a poetic compassion and a documentarian’s eye for human experience and storytelling.

Keith and Sally collaborate as half of an arts collective called AGGROculture. Together with artists Margo Ray and Scott Yoell, they are showcasing urgent issues like the recent conflict between APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) trade liberalization and local land use rights. AGGROculture embraces art’s ability to provoke and inspire, which is not what people normally expect from the paradise of Hawai’i, but it is what you’d expect from two of Hawai’i’s most provocative young artists.

Exhibit challenges thought, perception

By David A.M. Goldberg / Special to the Star-Advertiser

Through painting, sculpture, installation, photography and video, contemporary artists Mary Babcock, Solomon Enos, Jianjie Ji, Jaisy Hanlon, Sally Lundburg and Bruna Stude pre¬sent surfaces and textures of virtually limitless depth and nuance. All the work in “Biennial X” is related to our engagement with the natural world, albeit at various scales of time, from lifetimes to centuries. They are as intense as any sequence of modern mediated experience, but much more rewarding.

Solomon Enos’ “From Stars to Stars: An Indigenous Perspective on Human Evolution” features 11 painted portraits of beings descended from Earth’s Polynesian voyaging cultures that millennia from now have adapted to a life that treats galaxies like islands. They appear humanoid and sculptural at a distance, while up close they become gaseous and deeply microbiological. Hung on roofing paper scrolls, they could be honored ancestors, which cleverly loops Enos’ sci-fi narrative back on itself. As the Hawaiians say, “The past holds the future.”

Jianjie Ji’s “Reef” series interprets scholar stones: centerpieces of Chinese gardens, selected for their expression of natural forces that put human efforts into perspective. Ji pours various colors and layers of resin onto a horizontal surface and then insets matter such as concrete, steel, wool and bone. Vertical mounting produces monolithic forms centered at the bottom of the frames. Just as some scholar stones were celebrated as-is while others were selected and placed in rivers to be eroded, Ji’s process mirrors this hybrid aesthetic celebrating the found and the produced.

Jaisy Hanlon’s “Enlighten” video installation reflects her research into light pollution’s disruptive effects on nocturnal animals’ behavior. The space features images of owls cut from aluminum that are concentrated at the far end of the room. There a projected image of the full moon expands and is gradually lost behind an accumulating collage of urban skyline lights, streaks of time-lapse freeway traffic and glimmer. At its visual peak the birds’ reflectivity is saturated, producing a dazzling field. The effect is disorienting and concisely demonstrates the challenging perceptual effects of light.

Relief from such overloads is the theme of Mary Babcock’s “Surcease,” an installation that covers the walls in a hand-stitched layer of cotton insulation and the floor in black rubber. Two low platforms pre¬sent carefully arranged fields of charcoal pieces, some of which are wrapped in black string. Above hang teardrops of glass on near-invisible thread. Babcock is playing with several themes of absorption: the thirst of the wood and the cotton, the palpable absorption of sonic energy, and the gathering of human labor in countless of gestures of binding, stitching and sewing. This piece may be harder for some to access, but only because the viewer is the subject.

Bruna Stude’s underwater photographs are a series of deeply expressionistic black and white surfaces spread across several panels. Aside from “Cityscape 1,” which captures a series of shoreline buildings from just beneath the water’s surface, the representations in the other prints are considerably more abstract.
The effects are purely aesthetic at first, but enriched by the knowledge that these are empty fields of ocean transformed by manipulations of exposure. The results are far from documentary but through exquisite tonal range, fine textures and captured moments of trailing reflections, nevertheless project a sense of “being there.”

As Stude radically transforms single frames of ocean into experiments in depth perception, Sally Lundburg transforms a single koa tree that died on her Hawaii island property into what feels like a memorial forest grove. The floor is divided by three clusters of logs standing on end, each featuring a ghostly photographic image sealed beneath resin. Above the installation hangs a network of white branches woven through and bound with similarly colored fishing line, plumber’s tape, string and zip ties. The shadows cast by this cloud of arterial forms project a deeper space into the gallery walls.

All of this work offers a refuge from jabbering pundits and 24-hour streams of low-information news punctuated by shocking tragedies, by trading richly detailed tangible surfaces for the glow of the flat screen. Each of these artists has created unique and exemplary aesthetic and conceptual spaces that challenge and engage both thought and perception. As commercial media representations of our world veer toward incoherence, dogma, shock and outrage tend to replace depth, meaning and wonder. The Honolulu Museum of Art’s 10th biennial of Hawaii artists is an oasis in this desert of the real.

Mary Babcock - Surcease - Cotton, silk, steel, charcoal, hair, thread and glass installation

Mary Babcock - Surcease (detail) - Cotton, silk, steel, charcoal, hair, thread and glass installation

Solomon Enos - From Stars to Stars: An Indigenous Perspective on Human Evolution - acrylic, enamel, China Markers on asphalt saturated felt

Jianjie Ji - Installation - shark teeth

Jianjie Ji - Installation - shark teeth

Jianjie Ji - Reef, series

Jaisy Hanlon - Enlighten - Aluminum, enamel, digital media installation - dimensions variable

Jaisy Hanlon - Enlighten (detail) - Aluminum, enamel, digital media installation - dimensions variable

Bruna Stude - Platinum / palladium prints

Sally Lundburg - the disappearing place - koa logs and branches, archival inkjet prints on habotai silk, epoxy resin, latex primer, wood stain, plumbers tape, kite string, mason line, upholstery thread, and zip ties

the disappearing place (detail) - kite string, mason line, upholstery thread, and zip ties

Sally Lundburg - the disappearing place (detail) - koa logs and branches, archival inkjet prints on habotai silk, epoxy resin, latex primer, wood stain, plumbers tape, kite string, mason line, upholstery thread, and zip ties

AGGROroadshow is a pop-up traveling caravan presented by the Big Island based art collective AGGROculture. The show offers handmade goods and artwork from a variety of Big Island studios. Included artists are Scott Yoell, Keith Tallett, Margo Ray, Ethan Froney, Shelby B. Smith and myself.

Encouraged to expand on my 2011 piece clear cut by curator Inger Tully, I created a site-specific installation titled the disappearing place. It was inspired by the idea of a supernatural world where humans and nature intertwine, and utilized archival photographs, clear zip ties, kite-string, plumbing tape, mason line, tangled nets of threads, and a koa tree I transported from the Big Island. See images here.

Inaugurated in 1993, The Contemporary Museum Biennial of Hawai’i Artists was conceived to be a complement, as well as an alternative, to the juried exhibitions that take place annually throughout the state. The Biennial is not a survey or overview of the contemporary art activity in Hawai‘i but rather a selection of some of the most promising recent work by Hawai‘i artists. Each artist has been provided with gallery space to show a body of several works or create an installation at Spalding House.

Exhibition:

February 23, 2012 – July 22, 2012

Panel Discussion:

Biennial of Hawai‘i Artists X Panel Discussion
Feb. 21, 6-8pm; UH-Mānoa Art Auditorium, free
The six Biennial X artists will speak about their work and their approach to one of Hawai‘i’s most prestigious exhibitions. RSVP: 532-5217.

For More Info:

http://www.honoluluacademy.org

Review in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser:

http://www.aggroculture.org

Some Images (the disappearing place):

LINKS

READ – David A.M. Goldberg’s review below – or at http://www.staradvertiser.com
SEE – images from AGGROculture’s collaborative project “The Rat and The Octopus”
FIND OUT – about alterna-APEC at www.globoflo.com/alternaapec/
LEARN MORE – The ARTS at Marks Garage -visit www.artsatmarks.com

David A.M. Goldberg, Honolulu Star-Advertiser – 11.20.11

APECalypse Now?

Artists explore the effects of free trade on the land and the disenfranchised

By David A.M. Goldberg / Special to the Star-Advertiser

The Nov. 9 edition of the Hono­lulu Star-Advertiser included a four-page “everything you need to know about APEC” spread: an essay, crib notes and info-graphics backed by a digital photo collage by Bryant Fukutomi. Glass fishing floats of various sizes, each one representing a “member economy,” were arranged on a local beach, with the word “APEC” written in the sand.

This arrangement of baubles at the water line is a perfect visual symbol for the arrival and departure of APEC’s representative groups. But the artists, activists, community members and scholars who collaborated on the “alterna-APEC” show at The ARTS at Marks Garage present a fundamentally different perspective on what APEC meant to Hawaii and the world.

Co-curated by Noelle Kahanu, Jaimey Hamilton and Rich Richardson, the exhibition is united by a strategy of presenting bold, accessible images and ideas through painting, sculpture, photography and graphic design. The works challenge the idea that APEC’s goal of reducing barriers to the circulation of money, labor and resources (together called “trade liberalization”) is an inherently good thing.

Keiko Bonk replaces the prayers in flags from the Tibetan and Nepalese tradition with QR codes — those patterns of dots or squares that smartphones can decode. Each is accompanied by a simple assertion, such as “corporations are not people” and “economy is not sacred.” Because QR codes are part of corporate advertising tactics that link to websites, Bonk is playing with the idea that the forces we engage and worship are economic entities, not spiritual ones.

Eating in Public also uses recognizable elements to inform its work. The collective’s public workshops encouraged participants to print anti-APEC slogans on old T-shirts. Two are on display here. One is a tie-dye pattern that evokes Mickey Mouse (and thereby Disney’s Aulani resort) with the equation “APEC = land-theft” printed over it. The other features a blond female lifeguard obstructed by the words “welcome APEC welcome PILAU.” If these sentiments seem hostile or surprising, Eating in Public’s free “SAME ENEMY SAME FIGHT” booklet offers visitors a broader context than the general media.

The AGGROculture Collective relates APEC’s pursuit of trade liberalization to local struggles against the profit-driven and often foreign-based use of land and resources. “The Rat and the Octopus” is a triptych of photographs featuring two allegorical characters, the land speculator and the construction worker, and their magic economic ritual that turns land into a commodity. In the left panel, the phone-toting speculator wears a lime-green suit printed with a repeating pattern of handshakes and blooming dollar-flowers. The construction worker in the right panel exudes confidence in a stylized safety orange jumpsuit with reflective stripes. In between the two shake hands to seal the unspecified deal for the coastline behind them.

The “Passionista! Undressing Globalization and Militarism” fashion show also address the artistic and critical role that clothing can play. APEC has a tradition of chief representatives posing for a “class photo” dressed in the traditional garb of the host economy. “Passionista!” inverts this performance by designing clothes assembled from the lives of the women who work the low-wage outsourced jobs that often emerge from free-trade agreements. Hybrids of traditional garments from countries such as Peru, Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines invite us to unite the stories of many different women in one narrative of resistance to exploitation.

Representing Papua New Guinea, the least developed of the “member economies,” painter Jeffrey Feeger addresses his country’s informal economic practices. “My Lovely Market” is a deceptively accessible portrait of a woman selling her meager stock of fruit, cigarettes and vegetables. Feeger explains that his country’s government is ill equipped to deal with the multinational powers seeking access to valuable forest products, minerals and labor. By painting these women, using an innovative technique that favors the use of hands and fingers over brushes, Feeger documents a culture at the edge of trade liberalization.

We might benefit from taking a similar look at ourselves. Now that APEC is over, we might ask, What happened? Probably before the “new nonlethal weaponry smell” in the Hono­lulu Police Department’s updated arsenal could fade, Kollin Elderts was shot and killed by U.S. diplomatic security agent Christopher Deedy. The Elderts family suffered more than we who merely coped with desert camouflage Hummers blocking streets and onramps, and the local business owners who languished in secured zones.

President Barack Obama and hundreds of business representatives, foreign dignitaries and heads of state came and went like glass floats. The visitor industry is going over the receipts, minus some of the general excise and hotel room taxes. Compared with the massive anti-APEC public responses triggered by earlier meetings held in South Korea, Japan and Australia, Hawaii’s geographic isolation proved advantageous to conference participants.

Fortunately, we have courageous artists willing to weigh their values against those that are determined exclusively by economic assessment.

David A.M. Goldberg . “APECalypse Now?”StarAdvertiser, 20 Nov. 2011.http://www.staradvertiser.com/s?action=login&f=y.