Lehuauakea Fernandez is a Native Hawaiian-Japanese interdisciplinary artist from Hilo, Hawaii. She has participated in several group shows in Portland, Oregon, most recently “Window Waiting” at the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture. Through painting, sculpture, performance, or otherwise, her art serves as a means of exploring human relationships, Indigenous cultural identity, and innate ties to the natural world. The artist currently lives and explores in Portland, Oregon, while completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting at Pacific Northwest College of Art.

 Glow

Darkness is often a container of personal truths. In that way, it can be a comfort, enveloping and protecting the secrets we hold most dear. This is how darkness functions in Lehuahuakea Fernandez’s retracing // my steps, guiding the viewer from point to point, allowing these connections to tell a story within a story.

Allowing only one personal light source, which the viewer themselves must provide, one is forced to navigate through the two bathrooms, finding themselves faced with a barrage of small, personal drawings and illustrations, the mass and placement of which begin to feel like a sort of cartography.  Characterized by a series of repetitive markings and characters in graphite and ink, and lit by tiny glow-in-the-dark squares, you get the sense that maybe, somewhere, there is cipher that can reveal these hidden messages.

You also get the sense that maybe, those messages aren’t yours to decode.  

Maybe they never were.

-Melanie Stevens