A new art exhibit now open at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa highlights three artists who use printmaking and sculpting to tell stories of social movement, anxiety and distress.
“Still Standing: Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition” is open throughout March with works of art from Mari Matsuda, Erik Sullivan and Enrico Battan.
Sullivan said he started his project in 2022. He created a narrative, consisting of paintings and a large-scale sculpture of a functional character struggling with anxiety.
The purple caricature has human-like hands and feet with static eyes. The character is found walking through a beach on the toilet, with a dog or has its head in the clouds.
Sullivan called the character an internal persona, adding that he drew inspiration from pop culture references and the cartoon show "The Simpsons."
“This is how I see myself internally,” Sullivan said. “Let’s say I go to a birthday party, there may be a ton of people that I love, but if I’m suffering based on anxiety or things that triggered me or caused me pain in the past, I’m not there.”
He described his artworks with elements of realism, comical and illustrative. The static eyes represent how anxiety feels like noise in his head.
Sullivan also said he chose to paint the character purple to represent his feelings.
“This character is dealing with body dysmorphia, he’s dealing with fear of death, he’s dealing with anxieties,” he said while talking about his painting called “Impending Doom” to describe a satirical depiction.
Mari Matsuda is a printmaker who brings decades of experience in social movements in Hawai’i to her large-scale woodblock prints.
Matsuda said her artworks tell the stories of “people standing up against very powerful forces to try and stop something bad from happening.”
The prints are a series of the history of social struggle in Hawaiʻi, according to Matsuda. Her pieces span from the Great Sugar Strike of 1946 to the 2019 protests against the Thirty Meter Telescope on Maunakea.
“It took a long time to cut the lines into the wood,” she said. “To get the motion that I was trying to capture, I really wanted to honor these people and show that even though sometimes they were fateful, they were also incredibly courageous. So that mix of feelings, this love, aloha ʻāina and the fear and courage wrapped up at once and the solidarity when people work together.”
Enrico Battan used glass to capture the opaque and distress at the U.S.-Mexico border. His art pieces showcase the border wall's impacts on migrants and their families in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
He took photos of the wall and then printed the images onto glass. Then he stretched the glass to create a freezing-in-time effect.
“I can physically freeze something in time,” he said. “So I can choose what moment I want.”
The glass sculptures change throughout the exhibit as he stretches the glass, creating an abstract shape.
“It's nature itself, kind of tearing them apart. I'm just providing the ideal environment for this to happen,” he said. “There's a catalyst for every environment. I just provide the best catalyst I can to have these articulate shapes.”
The Art Gallery is open from Tuesday through Friday and on Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.
