Gethsemane
Nainoa Rosehill

Artist in Residence
September/
October 2024

Aupuni Space, in collaboration with TRADES A.i.R., is pleased to present an artist residency and upcoming solo exhibition by Puna, Hawai‘i artist Nainoa Rosehill. The exhibition, entitled Gethsemane, will feature a series of oil paintings developed on Oʻahu during the months of August, September, and October.

Gethsemane is ecstasy begotten out of horror; the resonance of paradox affirmed in the wake of our crumbling certainties. It represents a disenchantment with the immutable old cycle and a re-enchantment with fulfillment within an unreachable, unknowable disorder of others. It embodies a utopianism built through the rigor of daring to speak, to act, and to create towards a unity—surrendering to the divinity of unconsummated desire between the signifier and the signified. Gethsemane must be performed until it is lived, again and again. It communicates our exile from meaning, where redemption towards resonance must be hard-won. Gethsemane responds to the divine irreducibility inherent in possibility itself; a theology of tension; an ode to bonds.

With the support of Puʻuhonua Society, Aupuni Space, Trades A.i.R., and a wide community of artists in Honolulu, Gethsemane will synthesize a moment that wills the passing of insurmountable obstacles, the paving of the path to surrendering 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, marked by paradox. One cannot understand or make sense of revelation, only bear witness to it.

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