Had the ghost of 19th-century British author and traveler James Grant floated into thirtynineho-tel's gallery space on Friday, he would have wailed in otherworldly anguish at the sight of the mangled remains of his 1898 work, "Cassell's Illustrated History of India," on gory display. Brooklyn-based artist Rajkamal Kahlon has been disassembling Grant's book and others like it for several years now, painting grotesque and surreal images onto the pages.

Grant would probably be less sure what to make of the work by the show's other participant, local artist and curator Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, whose re-creations of local and Filipino craft traditions are affectionate, detailed and laced with biting wit. He probably would have suspected a common thread, however; both artists' works deal with the complex legacies of colonialism. Kahlon takes on the British Raj, while Lagaso Goldberg asks difficult questions about Hawai'i's history of immigration and plantation labor.

Kahlon is best known for taking an original copy of "History of India" (one of the many books about India published for a popular audience in 19th-century Britain), ripping out its pages and painting on them. The images are almost always vividly grotesque — stock colonial characters who are either mutated, mutilated or, frequently, in possession of exaggerated sexual organs. Kahlon's use of gouache (a water-based paint favored by animators and comic artists) makes her characters and their backdrops opaque and larger than life.

Books are important and nice, old books even more so; you shouldn't write notes in their margins, fold the corners of their pages, or spill bongwater on them. And you should especially never deliberately destroy them; this is one of the Ten Commandments of middle-class life. Violating the code is the shock tactic that Kahlon's work uses to draw the viewer's attention. But it is more than shock; a good deal of analysis lies behind it.

Kahlon began manipulating the books in 2002. "I began with a single page removed from the text and was interested in an intuitive response to colonization," she said. "As I kept working, the project kept evolving. The work before this show that was shown at the PPOW Gallery in New York last spring was a result of my yearlong research and thinking about torture, its uses and justifications by the state and the military. The imagery, as a result, became more graphic and off-putting to some viewers."

Kahlon's untitled video installation, a collaboration with New York-based photographer and videographer Elia Alba, throws her tactics into sharp relief: Kahlon's hands systematically hack apart a copy of "People and Places, Here and There: Stories of India," a children's book published in 1894.

In some ways, Kahlon's work is like an introduction for nonacademics to "Orientalism," the influential 1978 book by Palestinian literary critic Edward Said.

"Orientalism" argued that the whole study of Middle Eastern languages, culture, literature and history from the 18th century onward had been seriously warped by its closeness to British and French colonial ventures. Its release did what academic texts rarely do: It actually affected people. The work of several generations of respected Western scholars was suddenly called into question. Kahlon takes a cue from Said's criticism, subjecting the simplistic and exotic images of India from 19th-century popular books to a violent, dramatic rereading.

In some respects, Kahlon and Lagaso Goldberg's contributions are asymmetrical: Both take texts with some connection to 19th- and 20th-century colonialism, dismantling them (in Kahlon's case, violently) and reassembling them. Whereas Kahlon goes after the legacy of the British empire, however, Lagaso Goldberg's bracelets, quilts and sundry focus upon the legacies of colonialism for the colonized, rather than the colonizers.

Most prominent are Lagaso Goldberg's digitally manipulated, aluminum-mounted prints, which explore the Hawaiian heirloom bracelet tradition. Photos of the ubiquitous Island graduation and birthday gift are tweaked so that instead of having names engraved on them, they display words like "traitor" and "stuck," that display the more ambivalent feelings associated with growing up on an island with a history.

"The words that I chose to 'cut' into these virtual bracelets comment on my personal experience as a local girl returning to Hawai'i after being gone for a long time," said Lagaso Goldberg.

She also weighs in on Hawai'i's quilting tradition, which, like Christianity and smallpox, came to the Islands in the early 19th century. Over time, a distinct Hawaiian version of the craft evolved, depicting local foliage like the 'ulu or kalo. Lagaso Goldberg began with the traditional quilt designs as a template, but has reproduced them on cut Plexiglas, inserting plantation tools like pickaxes and hoes into the design.

Finally, she addresses the local Filipino experience specifically in "Biag ti Agtrabajo (The Lives of Laborers)," an installation fresh from "Contemporary Filipino-American Artists of Hawaii," The Contemporary Museum's 2006 group show at First Hawaiian Center commemorating the 100th anniversary of Filipino immigration to Hawai'i.

Two mannequins are outfitted with what appear at first glance to be colonial male and female garb, the barong and terno. Upon closer inspection, each are made from yellow latex, black trash-bag sheeting, domestic tools such as feather dusters and hand scrubbers, materials associated with the occupations of many local Filipinos today — those of gardeners and housekeepers.

Cleverness and poignancy carefully balance each other, never allowing the viewer to absorb too much of either.

Had the ghost of James Grant, along with the ghosts of British colonial administrators, plantation owners, slave-ship captains, mercenaries, etc., checked out Kahlon and Lagaso Goldberg's show at thirtyninehotel on Friday night, they would have shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other and muttered quietly to themselves. Who knows? Maybe they did.