hawaii pacific university

Linda Kane at Hawaii Pacific University - Honolulu - art exhibition

The drawings of Linda Kane give us a place to be in nature, a contemplative space in which to think about landscape and what critic Lucy Lippard has called "the lure of the local." Kane, a longtime resident who has taught at the University of Hawaii since 1991, has taken to heart Lippard's observation that "... the intersection of nature, culture, history and ideology form the ground on which we stand." The entwined impulses of artist and archeologist compel Kane to seek out places marked by physical evidence of a convergence of nature and human presence, and endowed as well with palpable mana, or spirit-power. Stones and earth are like bones and flesh: the history and genealogy of a native culture reside in the land, and landscape is the cradle of narratives of politics and culture.

In "Wahi Pana--Sacred Places--Kaho'olawe, O'ahu," a series of 13 large-scale charcoal drawings (most are about 40 by 60 inches), Kane uses the process of drawing to distill the power of specific sites, intensifying the atmosphere of immediacy. We are transported through her vision to places overlooked or inaccessible.

At times, that vision is quiet and idyllic, as in Wa'ahila upland forest, where dark tree trunks are softened by hatch marks of air and light and a path of exploration opens before us. Similar traces of her hand play across the surface of the moon, rendered during harvest season as an enormous, luminous disk caught in a net of tangled branches. Of such things have more romantic and sublime visions of nature been made, but Kane's robust drawings typically work against sentiment in their monochrome austerity, as do the places themselves, which resist the stereotypical expectations of island landscape.

Kane explores sites on urbanized Oahu and on Kahoolawe, a small island in the process of reclamation after decades of violative use as a U.S. Navy bombing target. The artist moves from the palpable darkness of a sky over foothills in west Oahu, in which clouds bear down on the land with improbable weight, to a large stone once used as a gathering place, boldly silhouetted and balanced delicately on an outcropping in the now-eroded and, for the moment, uninhabited terrain of Kahoolawe.

Ultimately, it is stones that mark the land most tellingly and serve as the most potent reminders of sacred places. In The chiefs' pathway, 'Ewa, O'ahu, Kane reveals the remains of a royal trail flanked by sentinel stones partly obscured in tall grass. In Please come back, Pu'u Moa'ulanui, a pair of stones that rest atop a small altar on Kahoolawe possess a brooding, animate presence as they face the distant slopes of Mt. Haleakala and the rain-laden clouds rising above its summit. Here, Kane brings together the forces of earth, sky, wind and water, concentrated in the eloquence of these stones and their stance of silent yearning.

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