Summertime. Whether or not the living is easy, it's warmer, longer, slower. Time's protraction and the oppressive heat invite certain pleasures: the long novel, the long evening stroll, the long tall iced coffee — and the underrated delight of a long blistering afternoon savored in a cool gallery, contemplating vision.

But if you're seeking a sprawling contemporary vision, a good narrative "read" you can languish with this summer, you won't find it (for the most part) in Honolulu's galleries and museums — small or large, commercial or public. Apparently, it's the season of the short-story collection. Or, in visual terms, the group show.

To be fair, O'ahu has an inexplicable predilection for the group show, summer or no. The feeling seems to be that group outings equal more opportunities for each artist. It's a nice, democratic thought. But the road to hell, it's said, is blacktopped with good intentions. And if you believe poet William Blake, excess paves the road to wisdom. Why not, then, explore one artist's excess instead: one developed vision, unabbreviated by arbitrary theme or deadline or space? The group show's ubiquity is all that's been excessive here lately — and if there's wisdom in that, it's parsed into kernels.

It's also true that summer, for some, means light: watermelon, or "SpiderMan 3." Still, what better time for the island's arbiters of all that's culturally savvy and subversive to serve up something meatier — pork loin, say, roasted gradually over coals, set low? Something you could sink your teeth into. Something marinated. For a long time. Seasonably long.

Ah well, mixed plate it is. Here's a menu sampler.

'Rockabilly Surf Show' through June 29, Chinatown Boardroom, 1160 Nu'uanu Ave.; 585-7200

"Rockabilly" features iconographic symbols of Kustom Kulture, the hot-rod-infused scene of mid-to-late 20th-century, Los Angeles-based custom car artists. That niche culture, inextricably linked to metal music and tattoos and motorcycles (think: a flaming winged heart petaled onto chrome), merges especially in this context with surf culture's parallel "finish fetish" trend, its glossy Technicolor surfaces. Particularly welcome are Jason Teraoka's witty varnished paintings of classic muscle cars, whose thuggish drivers' overbuilt arms hang knuckles-to-ground from their vehicles' low windows.

The Boardroom itself is hyper-hip, with terrific custom surfboards and surf goods (such as beach-bags-cum-rippah-surf-shorts). Like many Chinatown venues, the space suffers a split-identity complex: commercial boutique or fine-art gallery? Both get short shrift in the tiny storefront; but such may be economic reality in a town where visual art hasn't quite yet become a popular commodity.

'The Fashion of Weight,' through June 29, Nu'uanu Gallery at Marks Garage; 536-9828

Fashion victims assume all forms in Nu'uanu Gallery's remix of a recent Honolulu Japanese Chamber of Commerce "Commitment to Excellence" exhibition. The show features four 2006 chamber prizewinners, including Tracy Gunn, whose mosaic-studded sculptures skewer smokers as "suckers." Alan Konishi subs out jewel-grilled rappers with the sequined smiles of recognizable (to some) local artists, a clever absurdist nod to hip-hop culture — and an inside joke that may not translate. The ever-stimulating Mat Kubo offers several variations on "God, Grips and Guilt": wry, cast bronzes, such as a steel-shackled Buddha, that take their cue from sadomasochism.

Painter Lynda Hess' evolved iconography and stylized vignettes suggest meaty source material more imagined and personal than found or generic. Their urgent complexity transmogrifies the autobiographical into something more resonant: societal expectations of the female body. Modes of thought about femininity and conception — newly re-fetishized through modern medicine — engorge canvases such as "Evolution of Eve," a provocative meditation on in-vitro fertilization.

'Labwork,' through July 3, the balcony gallery, Kailua; 263-4434

The themed show suits May Izumi, whose typically cute-but-strange reconstructed animals are enriched in their new incarnation within the balcony gallery's "Labwork" exhibition. Her lab rats and Frankensteinesque female figure (a four-legged, re-stitched, red-haired Venus-sans-half-shell) become dimensional metaphors for loss.

Lori Uyehara's combinelike paintings address nature's fragility and complex ecosystems. Her heavy, carved-wood components often appear aesthetically at odds with her more innovative wood-chipped backgrounds, or topographical lines seared into flimsy wood scraps. It would be interesting to see these works writ large and stripped of carvings, intensifying the play between the finely painted traditional landscapes and those latter, inventive, destabilizing elements.

'Impressions,' through July 20, Hawai'i Pacific University Art Gallery, Kane'ohe; 236-3500

Rocks, flora, foliage, sea life, historical imagery and photographic processes seem the static currency of "Impressions." Its heavy preponderance of straightforward photogravures (intaglio reproductions of photographs) disappoints. Not that all photogravures here lack interest. James Rumsford's "Shades" offers an enigmatic voyeurism, courtesy the odd aura of a bygone art class sketching a nude model; her back-to-the-camera pose and pale bikini lines titillate. But where's Gaye Chan when you need her, to add a caustic sleight-of-hand to a curious historical photo?

Some artists rework the familiar, including Barbara Okamoto, whose "Extraordinary Behavior," a monotype on paper, derives presence from its negative space, value range and painterly string-wrapped stones. Maile Yawata's retro-graphic woodcut, "Madonna of the Coldcuts," invests the familiar (Oscar Mayer) with the melancholy air of a Mannerist siren (Parmigianino's 16th-century "Madonna of the Long Neck") — and in the process, does Betty Friedan proud.