Review of Hawaiian artists at American Indian Museum and Transformer Gallery

“This IS Hawai’i” may not be a big show, but as an example of crosstown collaboration, it is a big deal. It’s a two-venue exhibit, occupying not only Transformer Gallery’s Logan Circle area storefront but also the National Museum of the American Indian’s Sealaska Gallery. The show features works from four contemporary native Hawaiian artists, but it feels like — and aspires to be — a much larger survey.

In Washington, dialogue between the local art scene and major museums is rare. Transformer Gallery director Victoria Reis bucks the trend, co-hosting programs with the Phillips Collection, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

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( Palikū Documentary Films/Courtesy of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian ) - Navigator Mau Piailug is featured in Na’alehu Anthony’s “Papa Mau: The Wayfinder,” a documentary that is part of the National Museum of the American Indian’s festival of Hawaiian culture.

Reis made headlines in November by leading local opposition to the removal of artist David Wojnarowicz’s video from the National Portrait Gallery’s “Hide/Seek” exhibit. With the Hawaii show, she switches from fighting censorship at the Smithsonian to inserting her programming directly into one of its museums.

Independent curator Isabella Hughes turns in an equally impressive performance. Hughes brings together four artists from the island of Oahu, all focused on struggles between indigenous and invasive — but using sharply divergent materials and methods.

At the National Museum of the American Indian, the works of Carl F.K. Pao and Solomon Enos offer opposing relationships to museum culture. Pao presents institutional critique that would make little sense outside a museum setting. Enos is a comics artist, creating works meant to be seen in print by general audiences.

For his “Post-Historic Museum of the Possible Aboriginal Hawaiian,” Pao pokes fun at attempts by Western museum professionals to explain ancient relics. He fills plexiglass cases with modern gardening tools, grilling implements and feather dusters — the handles of which he has carved to resemble faces of gods or ceremonial weapons.

Faux wall texts created by Pao suggest a museum staff completely in the dark. Questions of whether objects are weapons, religious totems or simple cookware are left unresolved: “Here we have a piece that could be used as a ceremonial vessel, where the god spirit or personal guardian could enter,” Pao writes about a cheap charcoal grill onto which he has painted geometric Maori patterns. “Or this might give continued evidence that the possible Aboriginal Hawaiian did actually have the technology of . . . cooking food ‘above-ground.’ ”

The imaginary museum’s ignorance has a sinister aspect. Development regularly threatens Oahu’s ancient open-air temples. The historical significance of sites is often hotly debated, and preservationists and developers use different experts to come to different conclusions. Ultimately, Pao’s work reflects the battle between desires for progress and defense of a rapidly disappearing and imperfectly understood history.

Rather than reconstructing an alternative past, Enos’s “Polyfantastica” imagines a 40,000-year-old native Hawaiian civilization in the future. Through character studies, pages of comic art, epoxy clay figurines and a Web terminal, Enos invites viewers into a stunningly complex fantasy world in which humans wear organic exoskeletons, evolve extra eyes or finlike limbs and use technology to develop collective consciousness.