Amid the stampedes and shootouts that have marked this holiday season's consumer apocalypse, you may be facing gift-giving challenges. What do you get the otaku who is either a download away from anything or already has everything pre-ordered? How about some f'in fine art in the form of a wall-mountable skateboard deck, decorated with sketchy nurses, terrified teddy bears, homeless robots or fantasy characters run backward through a corrupt Sanrio filter?

With a sophisticated mastery of bold, intentionally naive lines and caricature, Cade Roster delivers 21st century pop art inspired by sci-fi manga, the "urban" vinyl toy scene, street art and the sardonic sexuality that powers various online communities.

Traditionally, the skateboard owner customized a deck with performance-tweaking wheels and trucks, and branded it with stickers, written slogans and drawn logos representing favorite bands, mascots, heroes and lifestyle magazines. It was a personal expression. Today's skateboards are more likely to be mass-produced graphical objects, adorned with boy-oriented collages of aggressive ethnic iconography, angry animals, skeletons, decay effects, hip-hop graffiti, tattoo-inspired linework and, of course, pin-up girls with outrageous bosoms.

Roster speaks this language fluently and has his own dialect.

Pieces like "Below the Belt" and "Bigshot" both feature the twisted teddy bear, a genuinely postmodern archetype that shows up in various incarnations from Kanye West album covers to Afro Samurai's arch nemesis to T-shirts, vending machine prizes, and articulated dolls (a pink one with fangs and claws guards the window at the Kaimuki Toys n' Joys). What was once a symbol of American innocence (think Don Freeman's "Corduroy") now communicates far darker emotional states.

Roster's isolated bears are clearly victims. Their giant shining anime eyes brim with tears and they chew their lower lips, anxiously waiting for some cycle of abuse to begin again. In the case of "Below the Belt," a paralyzed blue bear's head is caressed by a menacing female goth space-pirate (complete with Captain Harlock eye patch and scar). Though armed with a revolver, it's obvious he won't use it. Disarmed, drained of color and cast aside, "Mr. Bigshot" might depict the morning after.

Such PG-13 subtexts are reinforced by the "Devil's Nursing Academy" decks, Lovecraftian monsters stalking urban rubble, labia-eared dog-things ("Splendiferous"), scrapyard robo-hobos and heroes who don't seem quite up to the task of surviving the worlds that Roster has created for them. He gives us hopelessness, sexual fantasy and failure wrapped in relentless cuteness: hallmarks of a generation's visual culture.

The larger context of Roster's current efforts is almost entirely driven by underground and DIY artists who mostly paint in the streets or carpal tunnel through the rabbit holes of software like Photoshop and Illustrator and Web sites such as DeviantArt, 4chan and LiveJournal. Roster, a Chicago Art Institute graduate, wouldn't claim that his work has any greater conceptual depth than any of the content or the audience that inspires it. Yet he paints and draws with skill and control that is beyond that of most fan artists.

These decks are decorated with characters from animated features Roster hasn't rendered, toys he hasn't had manufactured, and graphic novels he hasn't published. Is he hiding something? In any case, whatever psychological or critical interpretation that can be milked out of the objects on display is undermined (intentionally?) by their sheer disposability and transience. They are pure commodities, fetishes, status symbols waiting to be activated, unique gifts, not something to actually be skated with like the works for sale around the corner at APB.

This show, a deeply local event, is an advertisement for Roster's fertile and iceberg-like imagination, which runs wild and bulky on his Flikr pages. Online, these and hundreds of other images are historicized and annotated with his witty, self-deprecating commentary. And they're sharable under a creative commons license! Why buy a T-shirt with his adorable "muddy playground" mascot (an iconic fusion of manga's emotional hieroglyphics and Charles Schulz) printed on it when I can peruse his archives, download and do it myself?

Perhaps making his work accessible, spreadable and no place in particular is Roster's simultaneous argument, riposte, challenge and manifesto. In that sense, Roster's content becomes irrelevant insofar as it is semi-private; he knows it, and these cartoon tragedies serve to render visible the form, structure and social texture of their consumption, production and promotion.

The Net is Roster's real gallery, the place where his community can "show him some love," and the criticism and the peer reviews actually matter. You can and should post your own comments for him in cyberspace and forget everything you've read up to this point. Getting "there" from the Chinatown Boardroom has been f'in fine with me.

David Goldberg is a writer and cultural critic lecturing in various departments at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.