Downtown Drawings
Nov 12, 2020 - Feb 19, 2021

Honolulu Museum of Art at First Hawaiian Center

Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (Group show)

These trio of drawings aim to excavate the physical and historical layers of Kou or what we now call Downtown Honolulu. Much of its history, though invisible, still remains beneath the modern buildings, streets, and sidewalks and many of us walk the same paths people of centuries ago once traversed.

After working in Downtown Honolulu for more than a year and regularly making trips within this condensed area, I have come to see this place as a collage where the present and memories of the past become wrapped together to create a space that exists in both, in this is revealed a narrow middle-ground between spaces.

In the drawings the stone foundations rise up and begin to meld with the towering office buildings and the uhi (sweet potato), grown in the area by King Kamehameha the Great, begins to creep along the pavement once more. The three drawings are separate but form a light story: the first serving as an entrance, the middle a composite showing a mix between the past and present, and the third a world where the two cannot be distinguished. 

The titles reference a Hawaiian saying which talks of Kou as a place of gathering and playing games. The title also contains a double meaning, either describing the meeting of friends at a familiar place or the idea of the “times”, or historical periods meeting, melding, and becoming something new.