Characters for Lily Wong may look strange at first, but only till you get to know them. And she knows them well.
They have unnaturally blue or, more often, red skin, but not as blue streaked with yellow green as the ground beside them or as red as the stone wall that, just maybe, allows her to call this home. They are unnaturally present as well, but not as close or, again, as red as the rising or setting sun. Much the same colors streak the sky and their clothes. After a few minutes, they seem almost everyday, at Lyles & King through October 14. 
There is a kind of magic in their magic realism, just as there is in holding a chambered nautilus between her hands and finding beside it her face. Or is it craft, much as with a tree whose roots flatten into paper, run up to a window sill where a young man is seated, and emerges as a scroll for his focused attention? One can feel the magic anytime, in a man playing a flute or a landscape that opens onto an arbor tunneling into depth. Or is it all an accident? Rope that a woman uses to bind trees, of all things, ends up snagging someone else passing by. She turns aside anyway to look out at herself or you.
One remembers most the color and the bodies, but not because Wong is obsessed with gender or sex. Two young men pose together, but not that way. This is her most intimate circle, with no obvious lovers or heroes. Most faces are scowling, and people may tense or bend like athletes in training, but only to fit into the twisting space that nature provides. Still, there is the strangeness of the everyday. Still, too, she can always rest her head in her hands, find a seat on a red staircase, tune out the many-colored stones, and consider what comes next.
Zoë Buckman has her unnatural tales, too, and she invests her women with more than enough magic. At least she hopes so, in the gallery’s smaller space, for they are herself and her mother. They enter a busier narrative than Wong’s, concerning family, race, and queer identity, and she insists on the details, with embroidered text. She has room for nature, but only because the images are a woman’s work and their work. The flowers pick up on the patterns of traditional samplers, and the paintings incorporate old fabric as well along with drawing. I find them a little too explicit or not explicit enough, but it is an eclectic mix.
This gallery loves busy painting and good stories—as with Farley Aguilar, Max Frintrop, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Chris Hood, and Kathy Ruttenberg. Now Ruttenberg is back, with a fountain in the backyard sculpture garden, as Twilight in the Garden of Hope. As usual for her, nature and a woman compete for which will overrun or bear responsibility for the other. The result is a fractured fairy tale, as with her summer sculpture along Broadway in 2018. It is at once crazier and more focused than past work, too. By all means, get your hopes up.
Is it a coincidence that she called an earlier work in the garden Sunshine at Midnight? Here she revels in the middle ground (though only September 23). A woman floats on her back in the fountain, as water streams from above smack dab in her slightly contorted face. Everything along the fountain’s edge, from mushrooms to a snake and what I take for ballet slippers, means well enough, unless they are poison, and so does a dog and a tree, bearing her image, presiding over all. You know the one about “not waving but drowning”? As the Band sang, “Ophelia, what have you done?”