Honolulu Weekly

Sometimes girls just want to have fun—and a playful spirit definitely pervades an exhibition of works by Jennifer Callejo, Laura Smith and Maile Yawata at Cedar Street Galleries’ Second Floor exhibition space.

The three artists share a certain graphic energy and freshness, but each has staked out a visual terrain of her own. Jennifer Callejo’s “Nice Fox” elegant series of drawings depicts a fox, delicately tinted coffee-brown, with sections of a schematic map of roadways in red ink, like urban arteries. Taking its title from a song by the Rosebuds (“Nice fox…stay out of the busy street…”) the series of drawings, while whimsical in feeling, explores the tension between the animated domain of nature and the creeping incursions of the built environment.

Laura Smith continues to explore and perfect her use of woodcut printmaking in a series of works that perfectly capture the sensations of warm sun and cool water, as a lone swimmer is depicted plying her way through a light-dappled pool. Smith’s use of multiple blocks, printed in different combinations and permutations of color and texture, yields numerous variations but also provides a strong coherence in the series, ranging from a series of “Pool Fans” to “In the Pool,” a complex work that makes particularly effective use of the accordion book structure.

Maile Yawata’s three-dimensional portraits in clay possess a keen sense of caricature that would be absolutely wicked if they didn’t also convey a strong affection for and affinity with her subjects. The “Night People” series offers compelling evidence of Yawata’s ability to capture a complex range of expression with a sense of gentle irony. While most of her works are wall-mounted heads, another series develops full-length portraits in which the head expands beyond the confines of a two-dimensional painting of the body. Yawata’s subjects include Mona Lisa sitting at a bus stop and a local guy in board shorts walking his dog. Yawata, like Callejo and Smith, proves that her work can be both light-hearted and thought-provoking.