To the Jamaican people, Bob Marley was a native son — even, to some, a prophet. When the Rastafarian singer died of cancer in his mid-30s, Jamaica mourned deeply; legend has it that more than half of the nation's population gathered in a Kingston stadium to grieve his passing.

Such devotion seems unfathomable in an era when musicians are flava-of-the-month Popsicles, and poets are read primarily by other poets. But then, Marley was a different breed of lyricist. He had an imperative. And to his audience, he spoke their truth. A fearless advocate of the "downpressed," Marley squeezed through the borders and barriers that he named in song to claim an international coterie of adoring fans.

Perhaps that's because "sufferation," in Marley-speak, was a common denominator. In his hyper-political song, "Slogans," Marley asked, "When, when will we be free?" His lyrics spoke primarily to a global, impoverished we; but he recognized that physical and spiritual disease can transcend class. (Money, he allegedly said on his deathbed, can't buy life.) And maybe it's also because his lyrics were not strained by condescension. He understood poverty and suffering but insisted on talking about life's palliative joys, too: love, music, and, for him, ganja.

"Sufferation: An exploration of compassion, endurance, love," the thirtyninehotel exhibition named after the Rastafarian term, explores its theme from a multifaceted, Buddhist-leaning perspective of compassion for all living things. Curated by N. Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, the show appears culled not from a large pool, but from available works by invited artists; the resulting eclectic selection curiously maps not suffering itself, but the concept of suffering — and feels more diffuse and coolly cerebral than the show's title (or subtitle) implies.

Take Jon Ikegami's terrific sketchbook excerpts: The roughly presented pencil and liquid-whiteout drawings imagine "scientific" pseudo-machines (in the tradition of Rube Goldberg's contraptions for doing simple things in arduous ways). Ikegami's designs impossibly postulate methods to quantify immeasurable social qualities such as cuteness, Asian-ness or manliness. Their tortuous weights and chin rests and Cy Twombly-esque erased notations wryly deconstruct a refined form of suffering: others' projections onto us.

Mariko Chang's white paper origami cranes, clustered in and around broken white ceramic bells, contemplate suffering — or more specifically, how to approach painful interpersonal situations that are beyond our control. Chang offers a meditative, stoic stance that verges on nihilism, or, less radically, Buddhism (emptying the mind to contemplate speaking and listening, toward peace and acceptance).

It's that coolness that predominates the show, placing it more squarely within strict post-structuralist aesthetic practice than within popular culture; the latter, as critic Hal Foster points out, fuses trauma to its individual subject (think: reality and "talk" television, the tell-all memoir). Give trauma a living, breathing subject to profess its ills, and you make the body the known site of suffering.

But while the body may be too present in, say, television's "Extreme Makeover," it's too absent here, given the show's theme.

Several works provide relief. Jenifer Wofford brilliantly sets semi-transparent drawings of immigrant Filipina nurses — rendered with graphic, retro, airplane-safety-card appeal — against an institutional, pale green background. Some figures interact spatially with an amorphous, cushionlike substance that's at once comic and horrible. Impassive, placid, resolute, the nurses appear to both accept and refuse their sterile, padded confines.

Rajkamal Kahlon alters book pages, layering gouache and India ink over a 19th-century text on flagellation's uses. Her cartoonish, militaristic, grotesquely drawn figure holds a gun and is shielded by a skull-like death mask; but he's betrayed by an open backflap on the seat of his pants — an abject, sadomasochistic touch that implicates not only the torturer, but also the power structures that bind him to his victims.

And Frank Sheriff reinterprets Michelangelo's idealized David, cobbling together a crumbling replica of the ubiquitous sculpture with metal rods, and poising its broken body beneath a terrible, Sisyphean precipice of glass shards.

Still, the show's most visceral works dislocate malady from the physical body: the nurses merely imply (another's) physical illness, the torturer torture; even David is more mythical than physical. In Susan Maddux's nostalgic watercolors, the absent human body leaves behind just its landscape-scarring built residue — not unlike Ikegami's measuring machines, which only hypothesize a body to fill them.

To discuss "sufferation" but remove the body abstracts it into a more remote social issue; that seems a long way from the original Rastafarian impulse to wrangle with poverty and inequality head-on. After all, if you're down and out, the body's basic needs are what's left most wanting: food, shelter, medicine. In this context, suggesting a traditional dish of "dirty menudo" to cure a hangover, as Julio Morales' printed recipe on transparent Mylar does, seems truncated and even cold — though its intentions are not.

Ultimately, the show's title and theme may be more distraction than aid. There is beauty here, in objects that speak of the spirit's trauma (if not the body's) and captivate the mind (if not the raw emotions). As philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once proposed, artists are soul doctors who incessantly attempt "feats" to make things beautiful when, in fact, "they never are."

In that way, "Sufferation" is, after all, a palliative that even Marley might approve.

Marie Carvalho is a freelance writer who covers the arts.