The drawings of Linda Kane give us a place to be in nature.

The drawings of Linda Kane give us a place to be in nature, a contemplative space in which to think about landscape and what critic Lucy Lippard has called "the seduce of the local." Kane, a longtime resident who has taught at the University of Hawaii since 1991 has taken to heart Lippard's observation that " the intersection of nature, agriculture history and ideology form the field on which we stand." The entwined impulses of artist and archeologist subdue Kane to seek out places marked according to physical evidence of a tendency to meet of nature and human carriage and endowed as well with palpable mana, or spirit-power. Stones and earth are like bone and flesh: the history and genealogy of a native tillage reside in the land, and landscape is the cradle of narratives of politics and culture

In "Wahi Pana--Sacred Places--Kaho'olawe, O'ahu," a series of 13 large-scale charcoal drawings (most are about 40 by means of 60 inches), Kane uses the proces of drawing to distill the power of specific sites, intensifying the atmosphere of immediacy. We are transported between the sides of her vision to places inspected or inaccessible.

At times, that vision is quiet and idyllic, as in Wa'ahila upland forest, where dark tree stocks are softened by hatch marks of air and light and a path of exploration expands before us. Similar traces of her hand play across the surface of the month rendered during harvest season as an enormous, luminous disk caught in a unadulterated of tangled branches. Of as it was things have more romantic and sublime visions of nature been made, if it be not that Kane's robust drawings typically work against sentiment in their monochrome austerity, as do the places themselves, which resist the stereotypical expectations of island landscape.

Kane explores sites in succession urbanized Oahu and on Kahoolawe, a small island in the proces of reclamation after decades of violative use as a U Navy bombing target. The artist actuates from the palpable darkness of a region of clouds over foothills in west Oahu, in which vast numbers bear down on the land with improbable weight, to a large stone one time used as a gathering place, boldly silhouetted and balanced delicately in succession an outcropping in the now-eroded and, for the point of time uninhabited terrain of Kahoolawe.

Ultimately, it is stones that mark the land principally tellingly and serve as the greatest in number potent reminders of sacred places. In The chiefs' pathway, 'Ewa, O'ahu, Kane reveals the remains of a royal trail flanked through sentinel stones partly obscured in tall grass. In Please take rise back, Pu'u Moa'ulanui, a pair of stones that caesura atop a small altar onward Kahoolawe possess a brooding, animate nearness as they face the distant inclinations of Mt. Haleakala and the rain-laden throngs rising above its summit. Here, Kane brings together the forces of earth, climate wind and water, concentrated in the oratory of these stones and their stance of silent yearning.

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