Review of Hawaiian artists at American Indian Museum and Transformer Gallery

Enos’s world reflects and extends Hawaii’s ancient animist traditions. Yet readers of his comics don’t need to know the sources of his ideas to enjoy his elaborate fiction.

This is a common strategy for all four artists: Despite exploring serious content, their works are playful, decorative and immediately engaging. At Transformer, installations by sculptors Maika’i Tubbs and Puni Kukahiko refer to plant species on Oahu, but also alter the gallery space and play off of the existing architecture.

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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.

Tubbs heats white plastic silverware and plates until they’re malleable and stretches them into shapes mimicking the leaves, flowers and tendrils of the invasive Woodrose vine. The results are glossy white forms that Tubbs intertwines with the gallery’s electrical cables, phone lines and switches. His pieces are slick and decorative but still retain the cheap look of disposable flatware — a perfect metaphor for a decorative flower that’s really an aggressive weed.

Kukahiko’s work is both more traditional and more subtle: At Transformer, she carves fast-growing, fibrous nonnative woods that resist her efforts. The result is a rough pile of wooden disks engraved with taro leaf shapes. While the artist attempts to make peace with this undesirable plant, the material won’t yield: the violence and speed of its growth has produced a substance not suited to carving and oiling.

Kukahiko also has an outdoor sculpture at the Indian museum: “Coming home to our most indigenous selves” (2011). The material is sumptuous; the artist’s treatment of the native kamani wood, carved into a sinuous form resembling a cascade of leaves, elegantly contrasts with the work at Transformer.

But the piece is tiny — so much so that nearby plants threaten to swallow it. This reviewer circled the museum twice before locating what — let’s be frank here — is basically a tabletop-scale piece. While the rest of the show feels bigger than it actually is, here the museum clearly needed to plan for something more visible.

Given that the show was successfully paired with the museum’s annual festival of Hawaiian culture, another survey of Hawaiian contemporary art seems likely. Let’s hope that for future iterations, the scope of “This IS Hawai’i” can grow to match the aspirations of its organizers.

Cudlin is a freelance writer.

“This IS Hawai’i,” at the National Museum of the American Indian through July 4, and at Transformer through June 25. Call 202-483-1102, or visit www.transformergallery.org.