"Earth 2 Water" is an accessible group show featuring the ceramic work of Yoko Harr, Keiko Hatano’s sculpture, Dianne Nushida-Tokuno’s mixed media, Lori Ohtani’s video/performance work and Noe Tanigawa’s encaustic wax paintings. Each of these women approaches the theme from a very personal angle.

Nushida-Tokuno’s "Seas" is a graceful row of seven small glass bottles, each filled with Kaneohe seawater, Kailua sand, and one of her deceased father’s large, wickedly curved, barbed fish hooks. They are tiny, humble and unique ecosystems composed from a palette of gleaming chrome, rust, lightly tinted algae and yellow hues.

Gallery lights cast the bottles’ gorgeous refracted shadows onto the small white shelf they occupy and the temporary wall it is mounted on. On the other side is Tanigawa’s show-within-a-show, featuring her encaustic paintings (tipping hats to Tadashi Sato), small vials of water from Late Titicaca (a "global center of female energy" in the Andes) and a listening station for audio she produced.

Like Nushida-Tokuno’s bottles, the paintings in Tanigawa’s "Oceans Suite" are worlds unto themselves. Tanigawa paints on Lutradur (a versatile artificial fabric) with hot, pigmented wax that yields a luminous translucency when cool. In particular, "Niihau Kahoolawe" effectively marries multiple perspectives, including forms that evoke the profiles of huge breakers, surface reflections, portraits of magnified algae and the shadows of schooling fish.

I’m puzzled why Tanigawa’s long-form ambient audio works aren’t played at volume in the gallery. These collages of poetry and various water sounds breakers, rivers and rain from Maui to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina make a compelling accompaniment to Tanigawa’s work, but they could also add another layer to Hatano’s incredible "Edo River Child," or any other piece in the show.

In any case, Hatano’s life-sized doll is a marvel. Posed in anticipation, somewhere between a recently freed puppet and an automaton learning how to walk, much of the figure’s modular ceramic body is covered in expressionistic brush patterns of purple, blues, browns and gray that are taken up again in more swirling patterns painted onto the plastic shapes the doll sits on.

Meant to represent the surface of flowing water, the spirit child floats atop these shapes that are positioned (somewhat awkwardly) atop a gray pedestal. The soles of the feet, parts of the hands and part of the torso are the purest white, and the hauntingly realistic face is a stunning spirit mask of inquisitive innocence.

Near Hatano’s river child is the blue video light of Butoh dancer Ohtani’s abstract projection onto fan-driven, hanging scrims, which she used as a set for her powerful performance during the exhibit’s opening.

Without Ohtani’s presence, the piece is a little hard to read, but moments emerge when the shimmering projection and the layers of waving fabric interact to achieve the optical effects of actual water.

This brings us to Harr’s "Ripples," which work from a contrasting position of immobility. Working in the grid pattern established in earlier works, Harr has embarked on a new exploration of color, moving away from monochromatics and earth textures in favor of perforated square sheets. The holes are surrounded or crossed by a wide range of colorful, hand-marked geometric shapes that read like fabric from a distance, but soon yield to a kind of vision-through-water that (again evoking Sato) indirectly represent the interactions of light, solids and liquid.

The show consists of allusions to and illusions of water, and though the pieces can be appreciated in relative isolation from one another, I found myself wanting views that brought them together with intention. Yes, one can simply shift the gaze or move through the space to create these relationships independently, but there is a missed opportunity to let the works speak as an ensemble in a way that the show’s title cannot.

These are details for students of exhibition design to labor over, as the typical visitor can enjoy the show and understand its umbrella theme without reading the entire space as a story but don’t underestimate the degree to which such subliminal efforts contribute to a lasting impact.