Alan Konishi and Jennifer Callejo are both netizens, part of the tech- and media-savvy Generation Y. The Web, and especially the virtual community MySpace, subtly pervades the work for this joint show at the Hawai'i Pacific University Art Gallery. Both artists take the digital age as a given but express their participation in very low-tech "retro" media — mainly painting, drawing and intaglio. These small, intimate works by Konishi and Callejo explore stories and relationships of their "tiny lives" — a term technology journalist Julian Dibbell has used to describe online identities formed in the virtual world of byte-sized proportions.

More and more, and as the work of Konishi and Callejo attest, there is a fluidity between who we are in the fleshy "meat" world, and the online communities and networks that we surf. What I find most interesting about Konishi and Callejo is the way they create a mediated distance from the naturalness and ease of their Internet lives through the nostalgic illustrational and pop styles of their work.

Callejo offers prints and drawings executed in a whimsical and playful illustrational style that feels vaguely of the early 20th century. Her printed portraits are all of people she has met, but only some in the flesh; others are "tiny" friends, e-mail correspondents and MySpace acquaintances. Yet she imagines them all as intimate friends (the titles indicate that she's on a first-name basis with her "sitters"). In each frame, the sitters are pictured against mostly empty backgrounds with just a few symbolic elements that float in space. "Matt," for instance, seems haunted by clawing trees and background fragments of diagrammatic landscape maps that look almost cellular.

Callejo's suite of animal drawings was inspired by wiki-style research. "Arrogance and Echoes," an illustration of two bees, for instance, came out of some mythologies about the insect that she found online. One relates that echoes can kill a bee in mid-flight and the other indicates that bees fly "under the power of their own arrogance" because they do not know that their wingspan cannot possibly support their girth. Funny, but the drawing reminds me that we might be operating under a similar power of arrogance as our "hive mind" culture, based as it is on the rapid lateral flow of information across the Web, lets us believe we can be everywhere and know everything.

Konishi's paintings focus even more on the relationships between our fleshy existence and online fantasies. The "Our Space" series, for instance, brings together images of Konishi's ex-girlfriends appropriated from MySpace pages and then modified, abstracted and given a neon-hued psychedelic pop finish. There is an element of stalker behavior in this series that Konishi readily admits. I think most of us can identify with his impulse; the Internet seems to provide a semblance of a safe, anonymous landscape in which our presence can be everywhere but rarely detected. Still, the idea of revisiting a relationship through current photos, of wondering what old friends might be doing now, is typical of the netizen generation.

Transforming old lovers into psychedelic patterns in "Our Space No. 1" displaces the personal onto our surface-oriented mass culture so obsessed with shiny bright things. These images are not solely about surface, though. There is an implicit, if calculated, violence in the missing faces that expose the wood panel supporting the painting. As with a photo that we own in the flesh, there might be a carnal satisfaction in this act of iconoclasm. The incision indicates the tension between the girlfriend's personal "my" space, and the shared, but lost, "our" space of a relationship past.

The "Homage" paintings blur the line between voyeuristic fantasy and the meat world. Each of these small panels is the designed imaginary bedroom of a woman about whom the artist fantasizes. The images evoke the overly designed aspects of our tiny lives, as if we see ourselves and each other through the lens of a virtual doll house (like those in "Second Life"). Konishi tells it like it is, especially for the Gen-Yers.

But I also find myself resisting the constraints of this tiny life. How do I keep from becoming an icon of myself?