Iwalani Kaluhiokalani is an American painter whose work centers movement. She reclaims familial and art historical lineage by referencing dance practice, dance histories, sensory ethnography, and ideas of Paradise which play as signifiers of her Eur-Asian and Pacific Islander heritage. She uses an in-depth knowledge of movement analysis to engineer rhythmic dialogues that mediate the corporeal body, memory, haptic perception, semiotics, and time. 

Using film stills replete with ephemeral imagery, she merges positive and negative cut outs into groupings. Painting from them at various intervals, the resulting compositions perform like choreography: simultaneously recording and transmitting the artist’s movements across a surface. As both a visual artist and a mover, she seeks the space where sight and touch intersect invoking the imagination, a place where color ways map the emotional interior and where figuration and the spatial landscape assimilate. She thus locates the construct by merging body and nature.