In a straightforward show that allows artists to speak in their own voices and on their own terms, Pegge Hopper Gallery launches 2015 with "13 Women." These are some of our heaviest hitters, veterans of state and private collections and various iterations of the Honolulu Museum of Art’s juried "Artists of Hawaii" exhibit. This is an impressive intergenerational mixture that demonstrates formal mastery, pointed critiques, stylistic exploration and personal narratives.

Allyn Bromley’s allegorical "Done in by Consumerism" uses light diagonal striations to cover the entire field, the bottom of the frame dominated by patterns that evoke shopping carts and handbaskets. Above them, hinting at classical perspective studies depicting post-Crucifixion Jesus, a pale figure reclines, visible from toes to midsection, one hand vanishing into a blown-out section of white. Abandoned in a wasteland, or washed up on a bleak beach, the figure can represent product or consumer, a sacrifice to capitalism’s narrative of ups, downs, aggression, competition and dominance. Its flaccid penis stands for loss, defeat and exhaustion.

In a compatible context, Kandi Everett performs a tragic and brutally reductive reading of contemporary U.S. culture, citing increased reporting on murders and suicides. Each of the two monoprints of "Oh, This American Life" features stylized arms holding bloodied blades, decorated with Christian-themed tattoos. With cold irony, Everett comments that not even this talismanic approach to religion and faithfulness seems to be able to stop acts of (domestic) violence.

Visual alchemist Sally French carries out a similar dialogue in the frame of "Wonder Woman Embraces Her Future." Here, a female astronaut sampled from the pulp comics of science fiction’s Golden Era confronts her future in the form of an armless doll laid on top of this image, its paint cracked and peeling. The two women share a gaze that crosses from 2-D to 3-D space and links their fates. It’s a comment on the inevitability of aging — no matter how technologically empowered the individual might appear.

There is a similar resonance between Mary Mitsuda’s minimalist paintings and Reiko Brandon’s paper and textile work. Mitsuda leaves the canvas mostly blank, save for delicate blue traces that appear to have run down and around rectilinear objects placed on the surface, like rings left by coffee mugs.

In a response of sorts, Brandon plays the blues, too. "Square Cocoons: Blue" is a large grid of hand-reeled silk webbing that echoes Mitsuda’s riffs on emptiness, while the incredible "As They Flow" is like the volume of a breaking wave turned into a book folded on itself, each bound page partially dyed with a rich gradient of indigo.

Kloe Kang’s series "The Wayfinder" features a waterfall of teacups tumbling down color fields of mustard, green and black. Highly enigmatic, these pieces speak to ceremony and divination. It’s a theme picked up in sculptural form by Suzanne Wolfe’s porcelain bowls that sample their patterns from other traditional Chinese ceramics but are decorated with contemporary western aphorisms and quips that would be revealed as their contents were consumed.

Emily McIlroy’s "Memory: Drift" (smartly positioned next to Kang’s work, which shares its palette and tone) surreally combines fleeting impressions of driftwood, bone, thorns and beaks into a rich psychological landscape that evokes Georgia O’Keeffe and Salvador Dali.

Amid the other works, Lynda Hess presents a performance/interactive piece featuring a solitaire-based card-reading system she has developed over the past year. Hess will be present during gallery hours to give card readings. With this inclusion of the (traditionally female) oracle, or fortune teller, rounding out "13 Women," the show’s feminist alignments are clear (even if individual artists don’t necessarily have them).

But for fear of violating the sensibilities of today’s tender-yet-reactionary political skins, I leave that interpretation as an exercise for the readers, who are heartily encouraged to see for themselves.