“Beneath the Surface,” an exhibition featuring three Kona artists, will be held at Windward Community College’s Gallery ʻIolani and is open to the public from September 7–30.
The exhibit addresses the impact of human activity and pollution on the ocean. Local artists Hiroki Morinoue, Laurel Schultz and Wayne Levin offer fresh visual concepts that express how they feel about environmental, social and political issues through their art.
Hiroki Morinoue
Morinoue and his wife established Studio 7 Fine Arts Gallery in 1979, as the first and now longest standing contemporary art gallery in Hawaiʻi. For Morinoue the landscape of Hawaiʻi, its light, rocks, skies and water, has influenced his work alongside the aesthetic of Japanese arts, crafts and landscaped gardens. In all of Morinoue’s work there is a compelling sense of place, curiosity and dialogue between the art and its viewer.
Laurel Schultz
Schultz is a photographer and multimedia artist whose work explores fragments of the natural world as a lens on human nature. She has taught photography at the University of Washington, the Photographic Center Northwest and the Donkey Mill Art Center in Hōlualoa, Hawaiʻi. Her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and Schultz currently lives on Hawaiʻi Island.
Wayne Levin
Levin moved to Hawaiʻi in 1983 and began an underwater photographic study of surfers, receiving a National Endowment for the Arts Photographers’ Fellowship for this work in 1984. In recent years Levin has continued to focus on depicting the underwater world in black and white. He depicts as many aspects of the ocean as possible within the boundaries of the black and white genre through photographing sea life, surfers, canoe paddlers, free divers, swimmers, shipwrecks, seascapes and aquariums.
The artists’ reception will be on Friday, September 7 from 4–7 p.m. For more information on Gallery ʻIolani hours visit their website.
For more information about “Beneath the Surface” see the website for contact Gallery Director Toni Martin at (808) 236-9155.
—By Bonnie Beatson
