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 enticement 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, agriculture history and ideology form the earth on which we stand." The entwined impulses of artist and archeologist force Kane to seek out places marked through physical evidence of a tendency to meet of nature and human neighborhood and endowed as well with palpable mana, or spirit-power. Stones and earth are like bone and flesh: the history and genealogy of a native agriculture 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 means of 60 inches), Kane uses the proces of drawing to distill the power of specific sites, intensifying the atmosphere of immediacy. We are transported [i]or[/i] part of to the other her vision to places view from aboveed or inaccessible.

At times, that vision is quiet and idyllic, as in Wa'ahila upland forest, where dark tree bodys are softened by hatch marks of air and light and a path of exploration make opens before us. Similar traces of her hand play across the surface of the secondary planet rendered during harvest season as an enormous, luminous disk caught in a trap of tangled branches. Of like things have more romantic and sublime visions of nature been made, on the other hand 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 upon urbanized Oahu and on Kahoolawe, a small island in the proces of reclamation after decades of violative use as a U Navy bombing target. The artist propels from the palpable darkness of a canopy of heaven over foothills in west Oahu, in which hazes bear down on the land with improbable weight, to a large stone one time used as a gathering place, boldly silhouetted and balanced delicately upon an outcropping in the now-eroded and, for the point of time uninhabited terrain of Kahoolawe.

Ultimately, it is stones that mark the land greatest in quantity tellingly and serve as the greatest in quantity potent reminders of sacred places. In The chiefs' pathway, 'Ewa, O'ahu, Kane reveals the remains of a royal trail flanked by means of sentinel stones partly obscured in tall grass. In Please draw near back, Pu'u Moa'ulanui, a pair of stones that quiescence atop a small altar upon Kahoolawe possess a brooding, animate vicinity as they face the distant direction downwards of Mt. Haleakala and the rain-laden collection of vapors rising above its summit. Here, Kane brings together the forces of earth, firmament wind and water, concentrated in the oratory of these stones and their stance of silent yearning.

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