Under Currents: Recent Work by Dorothy Faison

The recent works of Honolulu artist Dorothy Faison address her familiar themes of separation, containment, and protection and are a continuation of her ongoing landscape narratives. The title of the exhibition Under Currents refers to the hidden or alternate layers of meaning that her works convey. Working with various perspectives and spatial planes, Faison paints in layers with multiple references and meanings, alternately exposing and burying her imagery. The resulting works are contemplative, mysterious and complex.

Faison was born in 1955 in New York and spent six years in Central and South America before coming to Hawaii with her family in 1968. She received a BFA from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in 1977 after studying fine art, art history, and foreign languages in Scotland, Japan and Hawaii. Faison received her MFA in Intermedia from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1979.

Faison uses a number of recurring elements in her paintings. Images of islands, animals, tents, playing cards, boats/coffins, bee-hives, golf holes and helicopters become an integral part of her visual vocabulary, and relate to her natural surroundings in Hawaii and cycles of life (love, birth, death). These images at their root are autobiographical and make reference to societal politics and human nature. Random chance and the human need for meaning is one particular theme that continues to run through her paintings and is depicted by cards, dice and the rabbit. Faison adds visual commentary through insets of small paintings the size of playing cards within the larger works.

The late sculptor Michael G.B. Tom spent months helping Faison build her studio and the painting Recirculating Ratoon (for Michael) was started after his death. This painting has taken four years to complete, slowly evolving over time. It includes a layer of sulphur used for its multiple meanings and yellow pigment gathered in the hills above Medell’n, Colombia where Faison exhibited and held a workshop. The image of the bathtub in the painting can be interpreted both as a boat, a sarcophagus, a contained body of water with cleansing properties, and an allusion to one of Michael Tom's last sculptures. Images of a she-wolf and a portrait of her late dog, Pollock, appear as well, alongside an image of the faŤade of The Whitney Museum of Art.

Faison's series of small works on copper, the Portable Jar series, was influenced by 17th century oil paintings of saints on copper which her parents collected while in Bolivia. The depiction of saints have both a power and intimacy to them and were carried by Colonialists for protection and guidance. Using copper with the approximate weight and gauge of the South American pieces, Faison translated her imagery onto this medium. Rather than saints, the Portable Jar makes reference to the gathering, identification and protection of items from the "colonies" or areas outside of the mainstream and the simultaneous devaluation of these items. The reference to "items of little value" is used in irony as it is one of perspective rather than of absolute value.

The rich and complex layers of meaning in Faison's paintings cannot be fully experienced without the intense physical presence of her visual surfaces. The use of a multitude of techniques and materials including oil paint, pigment, alkyd, watercolor, charcoal, Chromacoal and Lithocoal sticks, add to the overall visual impact of the work.