Gallery Iolani’s "Communities, Disaster and Change" is like a deep, slow-motion documentary that meditates on and responds to catastrophic events that struck southern Alaska on March 27, 1964, when one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded liquefied the ground underneath the city of Valdez. The quake collapsed buildings, started oil fires and triggered an underwater landslide and subsequent tsunami that destroyed the waterfront and flooded the town.

The effects were measurable in Hawaii, where Hilo and Kahului saw tidal surges of 3 to 4 meters. We have since been reminded several times of our close seismic relationships with the rest of the Pacific Rim.

Though the video footage of Japan’s 2011 Tohoku earthquake is an unflinching record of Sendai’s real-time devastation, it is in a different category from the collective remembrance performed by these 28 artists working in paint, sculpture, ceramic, mixed media, photography and printing. As a commemoration, the show highlights universal aspects of disaster and demands that we hold multiple perspectives at once.

Inupiat (Native Alaskan) artist Ron Senungetuk’s "Extremes" encapsulates this challenge with an abstract mixed media work that simultaneously evokes an aerial map of the 1964 events and a vertical cross section that connects Earth’s core to the star that holds us in its orbit. The dominant concentric circular pattern radiates light and seismic energy out and downward. Sharp white triangles across the middle are both mountain range and fault lines, while increasingly turbulent blues of ocean waves simultaneously define a foreground and coastline. Earthy browns laced with the orange of magma or the shapes of burning buildings form the seabed and represent the land that was wiped clean by the tsunami.

"Extremes" unites an almost religious symbolism with the objectivity of a scientific visualization.

Rachel Mulvihill’s "Update" defines a complementary conceptual pole by reacting to recent wildfires in Alaska that required the evacuation of some communities. This painting is a portrait of contemporary media itself, and the means by which it distances us from the real world on the other side of the screen. Two ultrabright rectangles representing the LCD screens of a laptop and a television dominate the frame, pushing the domesticity of unfinished laundry into a dim background. In the same way that the best landscape painters can evoke the textures of water, leaves and clouds without turning to photorealism, Mulvihill smudges and blurs her pixels into regions of color that are immediately recognizable as the cable news crawl bar, an Internet browser’s tabs, or the rectilinear arrangements of images (hinting at unchecked blazes) and text blocks that structure Web pages.

Between the conceptual spaces created by Mulvihill and Senungetuk are numerous moments of hope and a survivor’s spirit.

Annette Bellamy’s "Life Boats" is a flotilla of beautifully textured bowl shapes that harmonize with Marjorie Scholl’s epic "Tsunami," which references the 1964 quake’s effects on nearby Homer. But rather than depict loss, she depicts community members riding the backside of the wave in boats and life vests, looking down the pipe at the doomed town they escaped.

Scholl’s also speaks to the apocalyptic whimsy of Gunther Bach’s "It Could Happen Again," which shows a debris-laden tsunami bearing down on two rows of everyday people. Though the documentary video running in the gallery makes no mention of the quake’s impact on the indigenous community, works by native artists Susie Bevins- Ericsen, Perry Eaton and Jim Miller attempt to redress this oversight. Their carved masks and assemblages eschew representations of landscapes to speak through older traditions of remembrance that hark back to earlier cultural disasters.

Like Hawaii’s artists, most of these Alaskans come from elsewhere but are united by a respect for land and people. Their diverse reflections on a catastrophe that resonates in the analogous terms of the wildfires, floods and industrial accidents that the population faces today are sobering and invite a deeper consideration of what is at stake than the typical politician or media pundit can offer. After all, plate tectonics are not governed by the demo­cratic process or influenced by political action committees.

"Communities, Disaster and Change" pre­sents us with the question of how long we can ignore the actual risks of a tumultuous and chaotic environment in favor of the "cable news cycle" that describes our world in terms of gossip, xenophobia and propaganda.