Artist Statement:

‘Archipels Again and Again’ is a panoramic installation through which I seek to create a multidisciplinary immersive experience of complexities inhabiting Paradise. I have referenced my Polynesian and Native Hawaiian Kanaka Maoli background to create sculptural dioramas (something akin to the Ahu or a rock Cairn) set in the midst of a large scale layered painting which rhythmically covers and crawls over all the walls in the Kingston Project space and ultimately expresses the celebratory nature of the Dance.

As a painter, performance artist and modern dancer, I intentionally engineer rhythmic dialogues utilizing my own video stills of movement sequences, Hollywood colors plus imagery from declassified nuclear test films of the Pacific Proving Grounds and Operation Crossroads in Polynesia

The process builds panoramic scenes where maximalist compositions are set within utopian landscapes that key into a multiplicity of figures, flora fauna and atmospheric conditions such as clouds, fireworks or fog bows.

Within Archipels Again and Again I wish to dialogue with historical and contemporary traditions of envisioning 'Paradise', and create an experience born out of being human in a body. I seek to locate the construct from within the merging of body and nature.

Bio:

Iwalani Kaluhiokalani is an American painter whose work centers movement in both subject matter and process. She uses movement and hyper-real color to explore ideas of connected space and history, heritage and geography.  Deriving cut outs from found photos and film stills replete with imagery related to dance and Utopia she collages together positive and negative groupings of silhouettes and paints from them in a layered printmaking-like fashion. The process embellishes surfaces with rhythmic dialogues and patterning by rapidly repeating similar forms at various intervals and sizes. There is ambiguity in identity and repeated phrasings of groupings collectively play off ideas of the 'Idee Fixe' or framings as in a 'Mise en Abyme'. These tropes mirror repetition of thoughts or ideas which are meta. Implied bodies abound and locate themselves in imagined landscapes. These terrains perform like choreography with phrasings of shape and color simultaneously recording and transmitting the artist’s movements across a surface in a vast multi-colored living world.  

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