New Gallery Exhibit ‘Through the Lens’ at the MACC’s Schaefer International Gallery

Maui Arts & Cultural Center presents Through the Lens in the Schaefer International Gallery, an invitational exhibition featuring innovative photography by six contemporary Hawai‘i-based artists: Vincent Bercasio, Kelly Ciurej, Noah Harders, Michelle Mishina, Brandon Ng, and Nainoa Rosehill.

The exhibition runs from June 2 through July 25. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free.

Gallery Director and exhibition curator Jonathan Yukio Clark said, “Through the Lens highlights the fascinating work happening in photography throughout our islands, bringing together six artists who showcase new interpretations of this medium. They use digital, analog, and mixed media processes to push the steps of image creation, whether staging, capture, development, or alteration. Through the camera lens — a bridge between the human eye and the surrounding world — they navigate societal narratives, environmental transformations, and alternate realities.”

Fresh bodies of work and new installations created for this exhibition explore photographic images as avenues of inquiry in today’s media-infused climate.

About the Artists:

Vincent Bercasio is a filmmaker, cinematographer, and artist from Pearl City, Oʻahu. His photographic series captures nocturnal thresholds between urban infrastructure and the natural world. Bercasio illuminates the friction of these spaces, where dominating human-machine presence goes unquestioned, emphasizing that alienation from the landscape will lead to us perceiving the natural world itself as alien.

Kelly Ciurej is a visual artist based in Honolulu, O‘ahu, and a lecturer in the University of Hawaiʻi system. She works with photography, performance, and installation to explore moments of self-discovery and the misalignment in thoughts concerning psychology, beauty, and the myth of “paradise.” Her series As They Say examines the instability of language and its role in shaping contemporary communication through photographs that move between direct interpretation and misrepresentation of idioms.

Noah Harders is based in Waikapū, Maui, and draws inspiration from the extraordinary diversity of flora and fauna that surrounds him, transforming natural elements into otherworldly wearable art and large-scale installations. In The Veins of This Place represents a new series of work that meditates on how deeply people are shaped by where they come from, who came before them, and the land that continues to carry them forward. This photographic series captures large-scale botanical works and intimate still life moments of red florals as they move through the landscape like blood through the body, tracing the deep roots of family, ancestry, and belonging.

Michelle Mishina, born on Hawaiʻi Island and currently based in Honolulu, O‘ahu, is an editorial and commercial photographer. Her exhibited works include photographic captures of Haʻakulamanu, an area of sulfur banks and steam vents at Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park that she has been visiting for forty years. Mishina uses the camera to extend her view from the park’s designated paths — the longer lens brings her closer to the untouchable landscape and finds compositions unavailable to the naked eye.

Brandon Ng, based on O‘ahu, is an Instructor of Art and the Gallery Director of Koa Gallery at Kapiʻolani Community College. His photography and installations deconstruct historical narratives to examine the cultural hybridity that impacts Hawaiʻi and its people. His installation Hawaiian Blood Quantum investigates the long-term consequences of the 1921 Hawaiian Homes Commission Act through photographic portraits of figures set against recognizable landscapes and institutions.

Nainoa Rosehill is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Puna, Hawai‘i Island. All is Vapor and Everything that Rises is a body of work that questions images’ ability to accurately reflect the world by looking at the shifting Hawaiian volcanic landscape. His works take form as sculptural objects, presented as reliquaries that fuse monochromatic images with native woods and basalt stones. They are complemented by a video projection showing 1,000 images of lower Puna following the 2018 eruption and nearly-lost video excerpts taken by Martin Charlot in 1964 showing the village of Kalapana before its destruction.

Schaefer International Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and also before select Castle Theater shows. Admission is free.

This exhibition is presented by Maui Arts & Cultural Center and supported in part by County of Maui – Office of Economic Development.