Our previous collaborative work focused on the impossibility of adequately representing the complexity of issues guiding human interactions with the natural environment in Hawaii. Through mixed media works and installations that juxtaposed fragmented texts and often "romanticized" images of the geographic terrain, we attempted to give some sense of the skirmishes that took place over the use and meaning of the land for different groups of people. Our work referred to problems regarding geothermal energy, contract archeology, real estate development, and violations of state laws protecting vegetation and wildlife native to the islands. In 1994-95, we began working with Michel Foucault's idea of the "hetertopia," a geographic phenomenon where two spaces of radical difference simultaneously occupy the same place.* We felt this concept was useful for describing the "invisibility" of settler colonialism in Hawai'i and the disturbing co-existence of two lived realities: the "democratic" nation of the U.S. and the "colonized" nation of the Hawaiian people. Non-indigenous/non-Native Hawaiian people, such as ourselves, who occupy the former space generally find it difficult to "see" the lived reality of the latter. This cultural blindness and "failure of vision" is disturbing because it occurs at the same moment that many of us support the contemporary efforts of Native Hawaiians to decolonize themselves and move toward political sovereignty. Perhaps the most difficult thing for non-indigenous people to understand is how we actively participate in the ongoing colonization of the Native Hawaiian people through our everyday existence. According to Haunani-Kay Trask, Native Hawaiian scholar and activist, "everything Western is hegemonic in Hawaii: styles of speech, television, radio and film, clothing, dance, food, habits of daily life, and more."** Seemingly innocent activities like shopping in malls, building homes, eating out, and making art, contribute to creating the colonial culture mentioned by Trask. Our project at CEPA gallery furthers our effort to explore the "invisibility" of settler colonialism in Hawai'i by examining our activity as non-indigenous artists. Can our installation of small drawings, photographs and texts, in which strategies of erasure and obliteration are used to fabricate and frame landscape imagery, be used to reflect upon similar strategies used by the dominant "American" culture in Hawai'i to deny the existence of colonialism and elide the presence of a subjugated, indigenous nation? How might whiteness and blankness (walls of the gallery, paper, plaster and masking tape) be considered not only for their visual beauty and formal importance, but as problematic "sites" and elements that enable the colonial production of works of art? We would like to emphasize the multiple acts of erasure and "masking over" that allow our work to exist. Is our freedom to artistically imagine/image the world without constraints -- to clear a conceptual and physical space; to begin on a white surface or within a blank space -- part of a Euro-American cultural practice that continually effaces the presence of pre-existing cultures? In what ways does our ability to practice art support the illusion that we live in a democracy and allow us to continually forget the contemporary consequences of the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893? How are we, as artists and descendants of Japanese immigrants/settlers, linked to the daily business of transforming Hawai'i into the space(s) of the U.S.? While our project is about a particular place, Hawaii, the problem of settler colonialism exists throughout the North American continent. We do not presume to speak for Native Hawaiians or any indigenous group. What we are interested in doing is reflecting upon how our efforts to make art or build homes for ourselves in Hawai'i and elsewhere, engages us in a colonial culture and economy in which power is unequally distributed between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Despite the racism we still encounter in the U.S. as Asians, our political and economic success in Hawai'i has prevented many of us, especially of Japanese ancestry, from recognizing our participation in something we know to be wrong: colonialism.   -Karen Kosasa & Stan Tomita * Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986),pp. 22-27. ** Trask, Haunani-Kay. "Feminism and Indigenous Hawaiian Nationalism." Signs vol. 21, no. 4 (Summer 1996), pp. 906-916.   Karen Kosasa taught at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in studio art from 1983-1991 and is currently teaching painting at the University of Rochester. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Visual and Cultural Studies. Stan Tomita is a third generation descendant of immigrant Japanese plantation workers. He was born on Kauai and resides on Oahu. "I've been using the same dodging tools for the last 27 years."