"This is the oppressor's language," wrote poet Adrienne Rich in 1971, "yet I need it to talk to you." Rich's quandary: how to use language, forged within a given social system, to express her dissatisfaction with that very system. The language couldn't help but fail her, she implied; it didn't include her experience in its making. It wasn't her voice.

In art and literature, voice is the sign of self. It's gotten a bad rap lately, viewed by some critics as self-indulgent and even passe. But voice is an important problem in "Makua," an Academy Art Center exhibition about Makua Valley, the verdant strip near O'ahu's northernmost point. Fifteen artists examine Makua's place in Hawaiian cultural history and its use since the 1940s as a live-fire training area by the Army. Their work speaks not just to the twinned plights of land and culture, but also to the hazards of using language (in this case, visual) to express suffering.

If the exhibition has a poster child, it's "Makua Bound," a sculptural collaboration between young artists Puni Kukahiko and Maika'i Tubbs. The anthropomorphic piece posits the valley as a female form, its armature made by transparent packing tape and packed with mulch and bullets. Suspended prone behind chain-link fencing, she's marvelously alive with condensation, stray bugs and tiny, stubborn kalo (taro) sprouts — a tree-grows-in-Brooklyn effect.

Trapped but resilient, her form sets the exhibition's tone. It gives us the show's dominant motifs and metaphors — soil for land, kalo for culture, ammunition casings for misuse — as well as its methods, such as viewer confrontation and collaboration between artists.

"Makua Bound" also reveals a paradox facing those Native Hawaiian artists who straddle cultures to communicate their messages to a broad audience: how to incorporate contemporary Western visual language and still express the profound pain felt by many indigenous Islanders — without scrapping Native Hawaiian visual language. Many works here labor to reconcile that position. And then there's pain itself, often voiceless, not just because it rises from a less powerful place but because it's simply hard to convey.

Take the bullets and bombs used predominantly in "Makua" to symbolize the sacred site's desecration. The ammunition casings that litter the valley are a powerful visual stain. Yet signs and symbols, repeated often, lose meaning; here, the image's impact quickly wears. The best metaphors stretch the mind beyond its usual contours; the worst blunt it. The bullet casings are so literal that it's hard at times to see through them to each artist's own imagined horror, and past that horror to a transformative place.

Pain is omnipresent in Meleanna Meyer's wounded landscape, painted on gouged wood. It and other works here recall Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, who similarly dared to represent visceral, difficult subjects (such as miscarriage, or her own physical suffering). Kahlo could be a resource to these artists: Her more surreal imaginings elevated pain and self-representational imagery to fantastical departure points, saving her unmistakable voice from literal thought's blunt edge.

Ironically, the show's most literal objects are among its most expressive. Rick Palmer's panoramic color photograph captures the valley's tremendous beauty and ephemeral spirit. And the interactive drum display, "Mo'olelo for Makua," is part crash course in Hawaiian symbolism and part invitation to a metaphoric communal drum circle that insists on the valley's foundations in native culture.

But the literal has its limits. So it's encouraging to see work that aspires beyond more literal-minded sociopolitical art forms, such as the mural (widely used by Depression-era artists, and in contemporary Hawai'i) or documentary photography. Particularly engaging are Tubbs' dioramas and sculptures featuring toy soldiers; Carl Pao and Jan Beckett's collaborative "Tire Ahu," a photographic document of a trashed-tire-heap-cum-worthless-shrine in Makua, whose surreal orange-glo hills and red sky recall poet Charles Baudelaire's "unreal city"; and Maile Andrade's felt-backed capes — reminiscent of Native Hawaiian ceremonial garb, but adorned by military-issue gloves and socks — that query guardianship and cultural loss.

Despite the sense of grappling with voice, there's tremendous spirit here, and strong content. Both serve the exhibition, and its cause, well. And there's hope in the show's struggle: Adrienne Rich ultimately forged her own, distinct voice — and in doing so, rocked the literary landscape.

Maybe it will be Native Hawaiian artists who lead the way out of a visual landscape mired in superficial imagery of Hawai'i and back into the valley.