Tracing roots and relationships

"Lineage" is a miniblockbuster show that continues the celebration and recognition of the Hono­lulu Printmakers’ 85 years of activity. Drawing on institutional collections, exemplary prints by heavy hitters of Hawaii art history are on display, including Jean Charlot, Isami Doi, Joseph Feher, John Melville Kelly and Huc Luquiens. In traditional terms these are literally the "founding fathers" who lay the groundwork for producing, collecting and appreciating Western art in Hawaii.

Through their work we see the tremendous impact that the natural landscape and people of Hawaii have made on alien sensibilities. There are many genre images of mountain valleys, forest-nestled homes and native bodies. These are roots of local visual culture, the themes, standards and qualities that still influence things like corporate logos, hotel decorating schemes and tourist brochures.

However, the show is not exclusively retrospective. It also includes the work of those who came up through the institutions, classrooms, studios and personal relationships that emerged from the efforts of these teachers. The emphasis here is on diversity rather than necessarily on direct influence. Works by Duncan Dempster, Vince Hazen, Laura Smith, Hiroki Mori­noue, Dodie Warren and Laura Smith define a broad but interrelated range of techniques and interests.

Take, for example, the complex relationship between Marcia Morse’s "Tokens" (a hand-colored lithograph from 1994), Luquiens’ "Mountain Valley" (a 1934 etching) and Edward Stasack’s "Adrift" (collagraph, 1980). There is a textural, visual and tonal resonance between Morse’s arrangement of masks, sculptures and plant life; Luquiens’ foliage, waterfall and distant mountains; and Stasack’s highly abstracted figures set against a stark landscape.

None of these works are intended to be "realistic" in the photographic sense. The grass path that cuts a diagonal behind foregrounded banana leaves in Luquiens’ work plays with perspective as much as Morse’s balancing of noh-inspired masks and ferns, and the perpendicular division created by Stasack’s tree. Stasack’s figures are built out of loosely connected elements that evoke bones, internal organs and musculature, but they are "collaged" and provide visual coherence along lines similar to those of Luquiens and Morse.

Though the show can be appreciated in terms of one’s "favorite" artist or seen in terms of their fame, one really should go back and forth between all the pieces. Several small installations that feature tools, test prints and intermediate stages of production will help the attentive viewer connect techniques to results and admire the diversity that the medium of printmaking supports. The stories that are included are also crucial to gaining a fuller appreciation of how complex and rich many of these relationships are. Knowing that Stasack inherited some of Luquiens’ tools shortly after his death broadens the context in which we consider these connections.

Details like this reflect the way that curator Erika Molyneux’s strategy shifted as she developed the show. Originally conceived as a formal exploration of aesthetic genealogies and direct teacher-student relationships, she discovered that printmaking in Hawaii was developed and sustained through far more diverse and organic influences that involved sites and places as much as they did people.

An ambitious computer-generated visualization at the back of the gallery pre­sents some of her results. This is a social graph, the kind used by Facebook to predict friendships and by the National Security Agency to detect terrorists.

The names of teachers and mentors are in purple capsules, those of students are in white ones, and it is well worth taking the time to start with a familiar node and trace its connections; inevitably there will be unexpected discoveries. Most intriguing is the small cluster of disconnected names (Louis Pohl, Sergio Garzon and Don Dugal, for example) to the right of the graph that, given time, will one day join the network … or maybe not.

Molyneux isn’t just looking back with this project. The printmaker social graph is driven by a database, much of her research was conducted via email, and through a blog she hopes to "create a wiki-like approach to the living history of our local printmaking traditions."

The term "digital humanities" best describes the use of technology to model, explore or discover new aspects of traditionally generated research. Molyneux has therefore not only produced an aesthetically pleasing show featuring some rarely viewed works, but she’s found a cutting edge that deserves deeper exploration.