An exhibit at the Downtown Art Center in Honolulu, "Dancing on the Edge of the Witches’ Cauldron” lives up to its name. It even pushed the boundaries of the curator Tom Klobe, an artist who thought about this exhibit for 30 years, when selecting artists for the exhibit.
“They were taking chances,” Klobe said. “They were literally walking on the edge of the witches’ cauldron. Fire licking up on one side and the boiling stew on the other side, and if they took a misstep, either way was not to their advantage at all.”
The exhibit features 45 pieces by five artists who have taken their work to another level. One artist has sculpted a human-size figure of shredded printmaking paper. Another sculpted a person with a 3-foot stack of National Geographic Magazines.
The Hawai‘i-based artists featured in the exhibit include Allyn Bromley, a printmaker; Sally French, a mixed-media artist; Linda Kāne, a mixed-media artist; Pat Hickman, a fiber artist; and the late Fred Roster, a sculptor.
Klobe, a former professor emeritus at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa’s Art Department and founder of the UH Art Gallery, said he was a risk putting the exhibit together when he had retired. But seeing it unfold was gratifying.
“I love working with artists,” he said.
Klobe said he wanted each artist to have their own identity in the exhibit. Like Pat Hickman, a fiber artist who created the gates at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center out of metal. She has a smaller display of that site.
“These little baby gates I made out of sausage casings, which I was drawing and sketching the idea as netting. Because the original site where the Maui Arts and Cultural Center was built, was a fishing camp,” she said.
Many of the artworks were inspired by global or local issues and even what the artists were feeling at the time.
Allyn Bromley’s work has human-sized sculptures in the gallery. Three futures appear to be sitting and laying on the floor, and they look mummified. But it’s actually printmaking paper.
“What printmaker would even think of, in a way, desecrating their creative work, but making something entirely new out of it?” Klobe said, adding that the piece might have been related to the death of her mother. “She wasn’t thinking of printmaking in a traditional sense.”
Some artists show their personalities in their work like Sally French. One painting in the right corner of the exhibit of a woman with eerie text that reads, “Wait … You mean I’m the boomer?
“Totally imaginative,” Klobe said. “It’s like storytelling but with incredible, almost nightmarish quality to it, and humor.”
The exhibit will be on display until May 29.
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