Sustainability is a hot topic in the worlds of policy and design. But what does it mean to make sustainable art – and what vision does it hold for our future?

The Hawaii State Art Museum Gallery Shop, in collaboration with artist collective Mori by Art+Flea, puts the concept in focus with a multidisciplinary show “Sustainability Now!”

In April, when the exhibit opened, the first night featured a variety of environment-focused activities, including an exhibit by Plastic-Free Hawaii and a showing of “Smog of the Sea,” Jack Johnson’s new film depicting the ubiquity of plastic in the oceans.

The exhibit was temporarily put on hold because of construction at the museum, but has been remounted through June 30.

WITH RECENT news that plastic fragments can be found even in sea salt, many of the artists seem to be grappling with a world where life evolves to incorporate trash. To my eyes, rather than pushing forward a specific vision of sustainability, the show works to understand and feel the flawed world we live in.

For those of us who have become tone-deaf to environmental advocacy, never fear – there is no preaching here. Many of the pieces blur the lines between trash and treasure, between lost and found, life and death.

Bernie Moriaz used an array of found metal objects to create boldly colored fish and animal sculptures. His “Humu #2” recreates Hawaii’s state fish out of objects like forks, a Hawaiian Tropic sign, springs and a dismembered hand, with “High Voltage” fittingly painted across its side. It’s such an interesting, beautiful image that it takes a long look to recognize and react to the jumbled parts of the whole.

In his painting “Totem 7 (Laysan Albratross),” Peter Shepard Cole gorgeously renders an albatross skull, accusing, atop a ritualistic background of decaying toothbrushes, fanned outward. In his work, “Mass-produced, disposable byproducts of our consumer-based society merge with organic, indigenous objects,” he writes, “to form a metaphor for Hawaii’s hybrid culture.” While Moriaz used trash to create Frankenstein-like new life, Cole used it to eulogize the loss of the old lives.

Similar to Cole’s totem painting, Jesse Christensen combined the natural and man-made in works that evoke religious iconography. Blending old and new, Christensen scavenged circuit boards from dumpsters to use as backgrounds for geometric, carved wooden faces. Surprisingly, the primitive-style wooden faces don’t feel discordant atop their circuitry. Instead, it feels like an almost natural union. It could be the perfect description of human life at this moment – people with ancient genetic programming living in a world of high tech.

“TECHI TIKI CALENDAR,” one of my favorite pieces in the show, is a round piece reminiscent of an ancient Mayan calendar. Thirty-one boxes mark the circumference; 12 gears surround the watchful face at the center of the piece. It feels like a calendar at once ancient and utterly new, and eerie enough to insinuate that it’s foretelling the perils that humans are creating for themselves. Time is an ancient thing, it whispers – but it may be running out.

Other works, meanwhile, show that the wreckage of this world can be beautiful just as it exists.

Mark Cunningham used flotsam, jetsam and many, many surf fins to create calming compositions that evoke the erosive powers of the sea in his “Fin Filet,” a collection of sun-bleached surf fins formed into one long spine. His compositions are serene in their simplicity; he celebrates debris as comparably beautiful to any element of the natural environment. He layers texture on texture: barnacles on debris on salvaged wood. In his presentation, we notice nature’s power of erosion — and how the destruction of the man-made can be beautiful.

The show features a number of artists beyond those profiled here, who all offer their own interpretations, and for some, solutions. Our trash isn’t going away anytime soon, these artists seem to say. Instead, it may form the building blocks of our new world.