100 STORIES: Crystal Liu, Ruth Marten, Rachell Sumpter, Yuka Yamaguchi

New York Gallery

Photographs and Drawings by Crystal Liu, and drawings by Ruth Marten, Rachell Sumpter & Yuka Yamaguchi.

In Crystal Liu’s photographs, meditations on her domestic surroundings become metaphors for her emotional life. Ordinary objects are arranged and framed to create extraordinary places. Peeling wallpaper implies secret histories. Cracks in a porcelain vase, a painted Japanese cup or a close-up of a shirt worn by her lover are the landscapes of dreams or symbols of private joys and sorrows.

Liu’s drawings utilize her peculiar visual vocabulary to further describe her secret tales. In a series of five works called “The Sea,” wolves, crows and leafless trees sip from and are thus transformed by a (literally) glittering, black sea.

Ruth Marten draws with ink on found antique etchings. The etchings, often of scientific subjects, are of dubious accuracy. Marten’s interventions further propel the imagery toward the fantastic, though where one leaves off and the other begins is not easy to discern. Like a child’s game of “telephone,” or the Surrealists’ “exquisite corpse,” the process yields delightful perversity.

Rachell Sumpter’s gouache and pastel narratives traverse documentation and the sublime. Dwarfed by the Northern expanses they populate, her characters intently engage in purposeful activity. Or could it be ritual? When does habit overtake reason? In glowing jewel-tones Sumpter presents fables that may or may not have happy endings.

Yuka Yamaguchi’s delicate colored-pencil drawings are often surreal self-portraits of her emotional existence — like if Frieda Kahlo made manga. In this exhibition, a series of seven works relate her body to her world. As the mother of an eight-month-old baby, Yamaguchi has created work which, like the baby, relies heavily on her breasts.