Hawaii’s fertile culture Webs, literal and metaphoric, characterize the work of Hawaiian artist Sally French shown at The Contemporary Museum’s downtown Honolulu gallery this winter. Included in a 10-year retrospective of Hawaiian art, The Webmaster is inspired by Japanese popular culture and animé art. Cobweb encased figures, part-human, part-animal, struggle in a vague darkness that may be under-water or outer space. Breathtaking draftsmanship meets American pop culture in the exotic drawings of New York artist Geoffrey Chadsey. TCM presented his first solo museum show in its magnificent hilltop Makiki Heights location. In Snoop we meet the rap artist, provocatively posing as a fashion model. Chadsey’s hybrids are imagined and fantastical, reaching their most amusing and provocative when we see his portrait of George Washington as a hippie folk musician and Albert Einstein as black rapper with corn-rowed hair and a jean jacket. Chadsey says it's "hip-hop meets Google meets family album meets Internet chat-room." These two artists, in their own way, provide examples of rich geographic and cultural cross-pollination, which is the essence indeed of Hawaii. Anne Lewis Vie Des Arts, Montreal, Canada January 2007