Hoʻākea Source 2024 Grant Awardees

Bradley Capello is an artist-organizer living and working in Kaimukī, Kona, Oʻahu. He was born and raised in Waialua, Oʻahu and Los Angeles, California. Capello’s work plays with the ideas of love and obsession, prayer and devotion, hedonism and restraint, sacred and secular. With an appreciation for the readymade yet a predilection for pink-hued fluorescent excess, his work often takes the form of site-specific installation incorporating mixed media sculpture, light play, and sound. Capello has been included in exhibitions at the Honolulu Museum of Art, The Contemporary Museum, Hawaiʻi State Art Museum, SPF Projects, Aupuni Space, and was a featured artist for Honolulu Biennial 2019.

Madelyn Biven is a Native Hawaiian performance artist and choreographer from Waimānalo, Koʻolaupoko, Oʻahu. While firmly rooted in Nalo, she was also raised on both coasts of the Continental US. Movement between worlds was a defining characteristic of her life. Movement came to define her. She takes inspiration from different traditions including hula, ballet, and contemporary dance. Biven has performed in the Honolulu Biennial; Oahu Fringe Festival; Peiling Kao Dances; Maui Dance Festival; and CONTACT Hawaiʻi. Her interdisciplinary work has been featured in group exhibitions and screenings at Aupuni Space, Downtown Arts Center, Hawaiʻi State Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. She currently teaches ballet and works as a dancer at Club 939.

In the mid 2010’s Madi and bradley found each other while working at the Honolulu Museum of Art. Immediately they fell in love and soon began collaborating—creating immersive installations, embodied performances, experimental videos, and parties-bubbling up wherever an arts institution welcomed them, gave them a space to fuck up, seemed ok with an occasional nip-slip, and permitted the loud music. Over the years the love deepened and grew; circles of friends extended out, overlapped and fused or cracked, changed shape, changed color, and time traveled. Intrinsically queer in its many definitions across eras, by nature resisting/ignoring convention and hardlined identifiers of/from any category, dutifully honoring ancestors and sacred source materials with truthful celebratory mimicry, and reveling in the wholly abstract, the spaces bradley and Madi make together brim with fun-joyous, rhythmic, glowing, dreaming/living as if/knowing it will last forever 🌀