Dark Slide
January 19– February 9, 2025
THE COMMONS GALLERY, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Place runs through this exhibition as physical being, as image received or unmade, as a story. Seven artists explore the uncanny materiality of the photographic medium to consider Hawai‘i as setting and subject. The work charts nodes of connection and histories negotiated and contested. Like the care of sustaining a family lo‘i photographed by Ualani Davis, the artists’ processes shares a kinship with the ritual of farming: labor, water, time, and also ingenuity, devotion, incantation.
The exhibition coincides with the FOCUS show of contemporary photography from Japan on view at The Art Gallery. While the FOCUS artists resist the ways images are “dematerialized in our current moment,” the artists in Dark Slide leverage slow looking in a specific context of place and time. And while some of the artists are rooted in Kānaka ʻŌiwi ancestry and others are more recent arrivals, they each approach from a position of close experience, a post-digital phenomenology of performance through presence. Fluent in screens but resistant to the siren song of algorithmic scrolling, their work invites us into their fields of view through play and abstraction, estrangement and interiority. Whether reaching into a historic process to activate present-day resilience, or routing late-capitalist structures with a CNC sword, or slyly countering tourist snapshots with notations of queer domesticity, these artists attest to the ways photographic codes can challenge, transfix, and transform.
Like the dark slide of a film holder the photographer pulls to reveal a sensitized film plane, so the work divulges intimacies public and private, stories of adaptation, a critical lens, a commitment.
-Yola Monakhov Stockton, Curator
Featuring:
Sheika Alghezawi, Kelly Ciurej, Ualani Davis, Kenneth Delfin, Leah Schretenthaler, Noelle Sheveland, and Mia Zheng
Opening Reception
Location: Commons Gallery, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UHM)
Date: January 19, 2025, Sunday, 2:00–4:00 PM
THE COMMONS GALLERY is located on the ground floor of The Art Building. From Dole Street, take East-West Road, turn left to Correa Road, and then turn right for the Art Building.
Hours & Admission
Tuesday–Friday, & Sunday, 12–4 p.m.
Closed Saturdays, Mondays, spring break (March 18-22), and state holidays.
Free admission. Donations are appreciated.
Parking is free on Sundays. Parking fees may apply during weekdays.
For more information, please contact 808.956.6888 and gallery@hawaii.edu