Affixed on your dashboard, her glossy golden skin and gyrating hips bob as the grassy skirt brushes against her ankles in a seductive, never-ending dance. The perfectly packaged brown girl is trapped in fantastical imagery of soft primitivism to excite and drive the fantasies of the American dream. The commodification of Hawaiian culture is an inescapable and unrelenting part of America’s Hawaii since its illegal annexation in 1898.  

My work interprets manufactured myths that drive the Hawaiian tourist industry. Through fragmented and spliced videos, I display how colonial systems do not serve the Indigenous people functioning within them. Caught in a constant loop, they reiterate the cyclical nature of the exploitation of Native Hawaiians contributing to a staggering wealth gap and ecological issues. My choice to cast the typically plastic body in pristine porcelain calls attention to how this tourist talisman has been and continues to be used as a colonial tool. Broken in their creation and united by their destruction, the hula girls are a plea to reexamine how we define place.