GETHSEMANE
Nainoa Rosehill

November 8 – December 4, 2024
Opening: Nov 8, 6 – 8pm

Aupuni Space, in collaboration with TRADES A.i.R., is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Puna, Hawai‘i Island artist Nainoa Rosehill. The exhibition, entitled Gethsemane, features  a series of oil paintings created on Oʻahu during August, September, and October. Gethsemane, conceived in conversation with the mystic traditions of the Semitic religions, will travel to Hawai‘i Island, to be presented in the Star of the Sea Painted Church, historically connected to Nainoa’s ʻohana and their one hānau, Kalapana.

Nainoa Rosehill is an artist born and raised in Hawaiʻi. His work pursues resonance and meaning in the groundless and anxious contemporary world through the rigor of intimacy and submission.

As a rising senior at Kamehameha Schools' Keaʻau campus in 2016, Nainoa was connected by his school librarian to the Aupuni Place studio program at Ward Warehouse organized by Nā Mea Hawaiʻi.

Phone-based studio visits began in the summer of 2020, with talk-story sessions about the artist’s perspectives on ʻāina, ʻohana, and the upbringing that shapes his worldview and practice. During that time, Nainoa began taking black-and-white photographs on 35mm film that powerfully record these elements.

The southern edge of the district of Puna was destroyed in the largest volcanic eruption in Hawaiʻi since the 1400s. The only building to survive the historic eruption was the Star of the Sea Catholic Church. Lifted off its foundation by its last generation of parishioners and moved to higher ground, it is one of three surviving painted churches in Hawaiʻi.

With the support of Puʻuhonua Society, Aupuni Space, Trades A.i.R., and a wide community of artists in Honolulu, Gethsemane creates a moment that wills the passing of insurmountable obstacles, the paving of the path to surrender to our contradictions of being, and the resonating of a visual echo that reflects the intellectual and symbolic genealogy of painting. Gethsemane deals in revelation; one cannot understand or make sense of revelation, only bear witness to it. Let witness be borne, and borne again.

Gethsemane is ecstasy synthesized from horror; it is submission before God and terror. The series speaks to the inevitable failure of our forms of representation in our present, groundless age. It is an image disenchanted with the immutable old cycle while  looking forward towards the unknowable other—longing for unification. It is an utterance of a Utopia unreachable by any means but through unconsummated tension—surrendering to the divinity of desire. A life of meaning is affirmed by reaching unflinchingly and meditatively toward perfect unity between man and God, between the signifier and the signified, between Heaven and Earth, and between the moment and eternity. Gethsemane recognizes the divine within possibility itself, moving ever toward the mirage of God; it is a theology of longing, an ode to bonds.