Exile is nothing new. Nor is art about exile's torments. Ancient Roman poet Ovid's stated desire in "Poems of Exile," written two millennia ago, hardly seems antiquated: "If one already lost could be unlost." If only.

Of course, leaving, say, the Hawaiian Islands for Brooklyn, by choice, is not the same compulsory banishment that Ovid — or, more recently, Hawai'i's own deposed Queen Lili'uokalani — faced. But what's common between expatriatism's smudged borders and exile's forced confines is longing — for an idealized past, for a homeland and self lost (because one who leaves is inevitably changed, just as one's land is).

"The Sun Never Sets," work by three Hawai'i-born expatriate artists on view at The ARTS at Marks Garage, rides this confluence between past and present, home and elsewhere, ideal and real. The title, an allusion to the Spanish-cum-British imperial boast — that the sun never sets on the (fill-in-the-blank) empire's vast holdings — recalls both Hawai'i's uniquely colonial roots and the permeability of contemporary borders. It's an intriguing and somewhat problematic title statement, as though a wishful reverse empire is also being imagined, or curated — and that empire is our island state, with its once-colonized expatriates now colonizers of the great elsewhere.

Impassable distance from homeland is typically rich terrain for artists, who draw on the emotional potency of loss and desire. Though such art has its pitfalls, trading, at times, the insider's myopia for the exile's blurred nostalgia, it also can yield useful angles of vision that reframe the artist's homeland.

With that in mind, what's most captivating about "The Sun Never Sets" is how the artists, on three separate routes away from the Hawaiian Islands, merged onto a path that variously queries the collision between nature and modernity.

Canadian-based artist Margo Ray's mixed-media installation, "Splendid Isolation," plays more to her

strengths than do her multiple sketchbooklike collages sandwiched on the wall behind it. The full-size, walk-in water tower, guarded by totemic gorilla/girl soft sculptures, renders a surreal landscape of crabs, snails, flora, wild boars, UFOs, islands and even a water tower within the water tower. While certain details, such as an octopus wielding an Asiatic umbrella, address cultural hybridity, the entire collage is a fantastical celebration of its oxymoronic title (akin to "exquisite torture"): isolation as imaginative, escapist and ultimately lonely.

Ray largely employs print-based techniques, such as photo transfer and chine colle. In contrast, Brooklyn-based Susan Maddux relies more on painterly techniques, collaging watercolor cutouts onto paper, or juxtaposing washes of black ink with vividly painted passages. The latter, posterlike works, with their retro pop-culture allusions (to vintage neon lights and black velvet paintings) recall the electric coloration of Chicago imagist Ed Paschke's paintings from the early 1970s.

While Maddux's iconography veers toward the esoteric, and the cartoonlike collage elements remain somewhat unintegrated into their overall compositions, the most promising pieces primarily utilize those lush, mysterious washes of black ink. Creating silhouettes reminiscent of contemporary artist Kara Walker's cutouts (for example, birds on utility wires in a fluid landscape), the inked drawings are like Rorschach blot tests that insinuate an intrusive, troubled coexistence between the natural and human-built worlds.

"Legible Nature: Fate is an Afterthought," Brooklyn-based artist Adam Chapman's generative video installation, simulates bird flight. Chapman uses computerized algorithms to create a digital imitation, then manipulates them so that the birds periodically converge to form single letters. Over a span of 200 hours, the letters spell out poems from the Manyoshu, an ancient Japanese volume that uses nature's ephemeral beauty as a metaphor for loss.

But for viewers, there's a catch: The birds' simulated convergence is visually difficult to read or correlate with language. Do they form letters? Characters? It's unclear; the concept's underrealized visual expression requires the artist's explanation. Installed dead-center near the gallery entrance, the lone ceiling projection is also regrettably eclipsed by both the larger exhibition and considerable light from the gallery's floor-to-ceiling windows.

Yet the birds' generated flight patterns are successful, visually, as an unnatural disruption of an organic process. Chapman's unreal simulation references how our natural world, reinterpreted to human ends, can be seen as a mutable "falling off" from a paradisiacal world. In this sense, the artist's intentions are clear and intellectually appealing.

If the art in "The Sun Never Sets" is any indication, Hawai'i's expatriates devote at least a portion of their longing to the unfathomable gap between paradise lost and paradise unlost. However nostalgic, the loss here feels real and not confined to a single place, but, like the expats themselves, to a planet endangered.

Marie Carvalho writes about art and literature.

A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR LOCAL ICONS

Visitors to "The Sun Never Sets" may do a double-take: Two artists, while not twins — or even acquaintances — bear uncanny resemblance to each other (or at least their work does, in its coloration, media and imagery).

Yet Margo Ray, who recently returned to her native Big Island from Canada, and Honolulu-bred Susan Maddux, who lives in New York, separately approached exhibition curator Rich Richardson about showing at Marks Garage last summer. Suddenly, Richardson found himself with an exhibition concept.

Call it kismet, but the startling coincidence may be based in Jungian synchronicity: The artists are dipping into the same primal pool of local visual icons such as Hawai'i's wild boar, which here symbolizes conflict between built and natural worlds.

— Marie Carvalho