By Craig T. Kojima, Star-Bulletin
"Leave Everything You Know Behind" by Sabra Rae
Feldstein is part of the "Washed, Sweat, Dusted" art
exhibit at First Unitarian Church.>
‘There's magic in
every day things’
Giddy Up Gals art show takes
By Nadine Kam
a whimsical look at the mundane
Assistant Features EditorAT one time, it wouldn't have been unusual to catch Alshaa Rayne at home on a weekend, dancing with a mop or broom. She had no intention of being a dancer or auditioning for a music revue, but as it turns out, the former house cleaner was rehearsing for a show of another sort. "Cooked, Washed, Sweat, Dusted" is an art exhibition dedicated to moms and house work.
"There's magic in every day things," says Rayne. "I've always appreciated the tedium of cleaning house, the dimensions it could take."
Many of the pieces in the show are funky assemblages of such everyday items as knives, forks, dish racks, irons, chopping boards, even a romance novel.
By Craig T. Kojima, Star-Bulletin
'In the Garden I See A Rose' by Alshaa Rayne
and Dianne Boons.
One of Rayne's pieces encompass a string of painted shorts bearing cele-brity quotes such as this one from culinary maven Julia Child: "Whenever you see food beautifully arranged on a plate you know someone's fingers have been all over it."Other works feature poetry by Rayne's posse of Giddy Up Gals, as the group of poets and artists call themselves.
"This wasn't meant to be a big art show. It was just meant as a fun thing. That's why we chose the name, Giddy Up Gals. It's mostly Sabra (Rae Feldstein) and I. We have so much fun painting. We like to throw things together."
For the show's opening, Rayne adapted a Civil War-era song, "The Housewife's Lament," and the artists -- dressed as house frau with rollers in their hair -- presented it to their audience.
"It was about how hopeless housework is and how you have to do it over and over and over and you never finish.
"Life is like that. But you can look at housework, or work in general, as something monotonous and dull, or you can think of it in terms of something high, something fun, something that frees us."
With a broom, it's possible to purge oneself of life's loose ends, according to another of the show's participants, graphic designer and writer Tess Black. In "Goddess of the Clean Sweep," she writes, "Spiderwebs, gecko sh--, drifts of fur the cats have shed -- collected in corners and under furniture -- they've gotta go. And with them, all those silly ideas I used to think."
By Craig T. Kojima, Star-Bulletin
"String of Shorts" by Alshaa Rayne.
Another of the show's participants, Patrice Wilson, a teacher at Hawaii Pacific University, said in her artist statement: "There are other satisfactions in my occupation, of course, but I can't dance and/or sing to myself while I teach as I can while I am ironing! Housework provides me with peaceful and relaxing interludes between papers and preps and doing my own writing."Rayne said, "Some of us consider housework a spiritual thing. There's a group of Buddhist nuns in Japan who cleanse themselves by going to peoples' homes and asking to be allowed to clean the bathroom. I think that's splendid practice."
Locally, she said she had the honor of helping to clean the Sukyo Mahikari Dojo, where "they actually bless their vacuum cleaners. Isn't that wonderful?"
Rayne said that she started cleaning houses professionally as a means of grounding herself when she moved to a new city. The work supported her while she built up her massage therapy practice in each city. She moved to Honolulu nine years ago and cleaned houses for a year, before her massage business took off. At about the same time, she started painting furniture.
These days, she relies on the company Clean Sweep to keep her life in order while she seeks Zen through her painting and poetry.
"Lately I haven't done much cleaning," she said. "I do more messing up."
Broom for a Real Man
By Patrice M. WilsonWhen a man sweeps with a dustbroom
he pushes forward, picks up, draws
boldly to the body, then pushes again.
we women, quietly defying, hold
brooms close, as if in a dance --
not like Fred Astaire who swept
too sweepingly through intimacy
for us whose subtlety is our metier,
the small immediate stroke
our trademark. Brooms for heroes
are hard to come by, the courage
of a wife facing cold floors, dark corners
with only a broomstick in hand
while he's out pushing and pulling
and God knows what --
But here's a softness --
hard work for even a man --
a witch's broom sweeping magic
in its closeness, comfort in making
a place for the beauty of clear,
clean imaginings in the shifting world.
Giddy Up Gals
What: "Washed, Sweat, Dusted," exhibit by Alshaa T. Rayne and The Giddy Up Gals
