It's usually a compliment to say that a creative work evokes a sense of place. Using the tools of his or her chosen medium, an artist employs skill and vision to transport viewers to locations far removed from where they stand in galleries.

The show running at The Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center presents art by Filipino-Americans who live or have lived in Hawai'i. To say that the artists evoke place is to see the way they draw connections between identity and history. Personal experience grows out of geographical context, and geography is altered by the lives of individuals. In this sense, place is something positive, something specific that grafts the present to the past.

Still, there are uses of the word "place" that communicate something negative. Think of what it means to say, "You must know your place." Much of the work in this exhibition of contemporary Filipino-American art not only evokes a sense of place, but also suggests that when people emigrated from the Philippines, they were confronted with a new and dominant culture that had the effect — through means at once social, cultural, economic and political — of putting them in their places.

Trisha Lagaso Goldberg provides a wonderful example of this dual use of "place" with her costume creation, "Biag ti Agtrabajo (The Lives of Laborers)." Turning from the staircase after entering the second floor of the gallery, viewers will see two mannequins in what appear to be traditional attire of the sort that might be worn at a ceremonial event in the Philippines. One mannequin is male, the other female. His costume is trimmed in embroidery, and hers is bright yellow, ruffled and pretty.

At first glance one thinks, "Ah. The artist displays customary formal wear from her homeland." As soon as this inference crosses the threshold of one's awareness, however, it becomes clear that the black purse hooked around the female model's elbow is no purse at all, but a bucket filled with a feather duster, cleaning supplies and matching yellow rubber gloves. Her dress is crafted from latex. The male mannequin is adorned in clothing made from plastic trash bags. The costume of ceremony and elevated status transforms before the viewer's eyes into emblems of servitude and labor. Goldberg conjures up a sense of place, which in turn evokes a definitive feeling of displacement.

What does it mean to be placed somewhere? What does it mean to be displaced in "dis place"?

Terry Acebo Davis offers "Pau Hana," a large mixed-media installation that merges images of sugar and pineapple plantations with references to ancient Hawaiian fishing nets, tourism, ancestral faces and technical drawings of skeletal and vascular systems.

The iconography merges into a collage of symbols mashed and inseparable, distinct and conflicting. Davis raises questions about the ways new cultures form from old cultures and about the effect of such assimilation on bodies, spirits, traditions and memory.

There is much in the show that works on a large scale to draw the visitor into the world presented by the artist. With "Apo Lady's Tienda," Alicia Ajolo fabricates a mom-and-pop vegetable stand complete with a coffee can for donations into which viewers have actually dropped coins.

By visiting this spot in the gallery, patrons become customers and customers become patrons. Boxes of marungay, a Filipino herb, bear the face of the artist's grandmother. To gaze at the installation is to peer into family history. The personal merges with the commercial; the private is forced into public view.

This line between public and private is effectively addressed in smaller works as well. In Sean Rivera's beautiful black-and-white photography series "Family," old-timey snapshots blend into abstract, vaguely erotic images of male bodies.

While many of the featured artists define displacement as a geographical condition, Rivera implies that family tradition and sexual orientation can conflict in ways that displace us from our own bodies.

This exhibition of work by local Filipino-American artists is a companion piece to "Alimatuan," the exhibition of emerging artists on view at The Contemporary Museum in Makiki Heights.

The First Hawaiian Center show never absorbs the viewer as completely as "Alimatuan" does, and this may be due to obvious differences in the two venues. The Makiki museum provides an all-encompassing experience where visitors are surrounded by inspiration and innovation. At First Hawaiian Center, viewers never forget that they stand in a bank surrounded by the whirring engines of commerce.

This does not necessarily detract from the experience. Rather, it reminds us of the fine line between place and displacement. After all, whenever we're here, we can't really be there. The contemporary Filipino-American artists of Hawai'i help us see the difference between those places where we wish we were and those places where we are.

Timothy Dyke is a teacher at Punahou School.