A new downtown art space takes on a new frontier

Digital Underground
by Marcia Morse
www.honoluluweekly.com

BitStreams, a survey of the latest in computer-generated art, has just closed at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Digital: Printmaking Now is just opening at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, providing an overview of recent works (some of which really stretch the boundaries of what a print is), which involve some form of digital technology. When mainstream institutions open their doors to new media -- and not since the invention of photography has there been anything so radically new -- the critical stakes escalate, and the conversation gets serious.

The precedent of photography as a mind- and vision-transforming technology is an important one to keep in mind, for it provides that essential third leg, along with traditional printmaking and new digital media, of the platform on which a growing number of contemporary artists now operate.

In this context, the current exhibition of members of the Digital Art Society of Hawai'i (DASH), titled Art Without Brushes, provides a local point of reference. The exhibition, juried by multimedia artist Peter Chamberlain, includes work by 12 artists; the diverse visual signatures are a salient reminder that the broad brush of technology and the refinements of individual vision an style work best in synch, and in synergy. Some artists are still experimenting, exploring options; others have found a more committed path of inquiry.

Jo Giubilato shows both a photo-based intaglio print "Lauhala Woman" and "Love Me, Love Me Not" -- a digital print generated with drawing-based software. The same refreshing simplicity of means characterizes the work of Ellen Chapman, whose sense of humor is evident in both works included here. Richard Palmer, a frequent participant in printmaking exhibitions, shows both a photo-etching "Einstein's Dog" and "Incubation" -- a digital print in which an egg shape emerges from a field of small tessellated sections. Though working only in digital media, Jim Egan still seems in search of a personal style, his three digital prints could hardly be more different.

The exhibition, billed as "emerging visions in digital painting, printmaking and photography," asks us to consider hybrid versions of more familiar forms, by implication validating or legitimizing new media by virtue of their connections to more established categories. That strategy may have some short-term benefits by encouraging the audience to see digital media as kin to things they know. But is also carries some longer-term liabilities because artists should really be thinking about things one can do with digital media that can't be done any other way.

As a prime example, printing a digital image on canvas does not a painting make. Sure, you get some surface texture that begins to counter the inexorable flatness of digital output, but beyond that, what is the point?

Maybe an expanded scale, as works on canvas by artists Sharon Hardie and Stefan illustrate. More engaging are works on canvas by Arthur Nelander, whose handling of human figures in the larger-scale "Secrets" and the smaller-scale diptych "Disabled Angels," manages to create a quietly provocative balance between painterly and photographic approaches to rendering the image. Phil Uhl also provides an interesting exploration of this issue. His works range from "Chroma del Mar," a monoprint with actual impasto (surface texture created through the use of a viscous medium), to a digital print on canvas, "Ancestral Shore," one of the more substantial works in the exhibition, to "Hanauma," a digital print on paper with the illusion of impasto, thus closing the circle of manipulation.

Elizabeth Zinn's digital prints bring a different painterly sensibility to bear in works on paper that have a strong affinity with watercolor. Joan Pabst Dubanoski offers strong work in digital photography, including two portrait-like studies of local flora ("Passion Flower" and "Blue Banana") and a more abstract and constructed study of "Phantoms of the Metro."

The strongest bodies of work are those of Bobby Crockett and Mark Ammen, who are developing clear signatures and, with them convincing rationales for use of digital media. Crockett has developed a keep sense of how to balance pattern, abstraction and implications of real space -- it all comes together in works like "Museum" and "Homage to F. L. Wright."

Ammen's work, which has matured substantially in the last year or so, demonstrates a high level of technical expertise and, what is more important, a clearer focus on a specific arena of image-making. Where Crockett is often involved with architectural structure, Ammen tends more toward the organic or biomorphic, as is evident in works like "Oxygen" and "Heart's Awakening."

The current exhibition of DASH is the inaugural offering for a new downtown gallery space, @the underground, located downstairs from the Hawaiian-Chinese Multicultural Museum and Archives adjacent to the Fort Street Mall on King Street. The gallery is owned and managed by Charles Christian Hansen, a former member of DASH who now works independently as a digital artist. Hansen's work is also on view; he (and his son Denim) offer an alternative mode of presentation which other artists might do well to consider: on-screen display of digital images.

This serves as a potent reminder that while digital artists may find kindred spirits in those who wrestle in other media with "input" -- that is, image generation, they have still to resolve some very complicated issues of "output." What tangible forms will the work take? To what extent will those forms appropriate preexisting models? To what extent will they create a new language and a new vision? It may be too soon to have a clear sense of how to answer those questions, but the value of this exhibition is that is raises them.

The 2001 Summer Show of the Digital Art Society of Hawai'i: Art Without Brushes: Contemporary image making/emerging visions -- @the underground, 91 South King Street: Monday - Friday, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. Through 7/20.