From a Native Daughter: Seeking Home and Ancestral Lines through a Dashboard Hula Girl (original) (raw)

2018, Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal

Nānā i ke kumu. Look to the source.-Hawaiian 'ōlelo no'eau (proverb) In the Hawaiian language the term 'ae kai refers to the place where land and sea meet, the water's edge or shoreline, the beach. It is, as Pacific historian Greg Dening has written, an "in-between space…an unresolved space where things can happen, where things can be made to happen. It is a space of transformation. It is a space of crossings." 1 This expanded definition of 'ae kai serves as a cogent touchstone for examining Adrienne Keahi Pao's and Robin Lasser's most recent installation work Dashboard Hula Girl: In Search of Aunty Keahi, which featured in the Smithsonian's Culture Lab exhibition 'Ae Kai: A Culture Lab on Convergence in Honolulu, July 7-9, 2017. In the following writing, I invoke a sort of 'ae kai of my own in which I merge scholarly analysis with visceral first-hand experience of Dashboard Hula Girl. The result, I hope, is a richly textured exposé that simulates in written form the enigmatic domain that comprises the convergence zone-that is, the 'ae kai-of intellectual understanding and felt encounter. San Francisco-based artists Pao and Lasser have been combining their creative energies for well over a decade to produce their enigmatic "Dress Tent" installation and photographic series. 2 The dress tents, which manifest as large-scale interactive "garments" that are erected on site-specific landscapes and worn by female subjects, are in equal measure whimsically playful and incisively political. In what amounts to a fusion of architecture, sculpture, fashion, the body, and the land, the tents function as discrete spaces for addressing a wide range of contemporary issues, including identity, gender