Wailoa Center’s Main and Fountain Galleries for June Opening Reception Friday June 5th 5 to 7pm

“Category” presented by Etc., Inc.

Wailoa Center’s Main Gallery will host an exhibit opening June 5th to June 25th presented by Etc., Inc., a group of nine artists including Lonny Tomono, Tobias Brill, Kevin Diminyatz, Leslie Samson-Tabakin, Rann Sergeant, Kawa Harijan, Jerilee Negrillo, Liv Johnson and Jon Goebel. Hailing from Hilo, Hawaii, Etc., Inc. forms a collective that shares ideas, inspiration, and methods of drawing, painting and printmaking. They strive to inform, challenge and encourage each other to create work that embodies a personal view of contemporary life in Hawaii. The show will include monoprints, etchings, relief prints, screen prints, watercolors, paintings, mixed media works and more.

A reception for the artists will be held on Friday, June 5th from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Artists will be present to meet the public and guest artist Kandi Everett, well known for her tattoo art and prints will have a gallery talk about her work and her art on display beginning at 5:00 p.m. followed by light refreshments and musical entertainment by Kawa Harijan.

Kandi Everett received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1969 from the University of Hawaii and has been a member of the Honolulu Printmakers for over ten years and has been a tattoo artist for over thirty five years. Everett worked at the famed China Sea Tattoo in Honolulu’s Chinatown from 1977 to 1994. She is well represented in books and articles on tattooing, and her work has been shown in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe.

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Wailoa Center’s Fountain Gallery will present an exhibit /video installation by Laura Moidel Acevedo titled “Antrozoumorphism” June 5th to the 25th. This exhibit is the latest in a series of projects examining the role of Jungian archetypes in the virtual reality of Second Life (SL), and the interplay between that reality and this reality we call Real Life (RL). This 15 min video and group of prints introduces the SL avatar Antrozous Frostwych, who symbolizes the archetype of the Artist as Trickster. Antrozous represents me as an artist in Second Life, and has a gallery there called Frostwych Gallery that features digital art created from images found in both SL and RL, much like the gallery that I have here in Hilo by the same name.

When I first created Antrozous six years ago it was for a collaborative project that I was working on with the SL artist Ellectra Radikal, and she looked very much like the white bat (Antrozous Pallidus) that she was named after. Since that time, however, she has evolved through a series of personas as a result of exploring the world of art and role-play in virtual reality. She has morphed from her original alien space-time traveling succubus to an ice queen, various dragons, animals, witches, cyborgs and fauns, and sometimes combinations of those. She has been a variety of shapes and her skin has changed from white to blue, grey, green, turquoise, purple, bronze, amethyst and lavender. She does have a few defining characteristics though that identify her, she is almost always very tall and usually is an anthropomorphic blend of creature and woman, often mythological. And of course she is always the shape-shifting Trickster who is cool and detached, beautiful and dangerous at the same time.

So the purpose of this project is to take the viewer on Antrozous’ journey of her continually evolving self. In the video which was filmed in Second Life she starts out as she first appeared then morphs through 33 different shapes and outfits in the next 14 minutes, eventually returning to her original form in a continuously repeating loop. The fine art prints can be thought of as snapshots of her along the way in various settings in Second Life, and the original music is a jazz/world beat/Hindustani raga fusion inspired by the fierce goddess Bhairavi who I would suspect she has some kinship with.

Laura Moidel Acevedo is a psychotherapist in private practice who incorporates art, music, and Virtual Reality Therapy (VRT) into her healing work. She has been creating original art and music since 1966. She graduated with a BA in Psychology with an Art Minor from CSU Fullerton and has a MA in Counseling Psychology from UH Hilo. She has shown her artwork previously at Wailoa Center and the Hawaii Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as internationally in several virtual galleries and her own Frostwych Gallery in Hilo Hawaii. She is a founding member of the Hawaii Island Indian Music Circle and performs Hindustani Jazz Fusion in public venues regularly.

There will be a reception for the artist on Friday June 5th from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Laura Acevedo will be performing the sound track from her video while it plays at 6:00 p.m. which is in the Hindustani Jazz Fusion genre.

Wailoa Center is a Division of State Parks, Department of Land and Natural Resources. It is free and opened to the public Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The Center is closed on Saturdays, Sundays and State Holidays. For additional information please call 933-0416 or email wailoa.

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