Through June 20, Quint Gallery (664 9th...

Through June 20, Quint Gallery (664 9th Ave.) is showing paintings and constructions by Ming Murray and photographs by A. Wasil.

Born in Hong Kong and now living in San Diego and New York, Murray brings together in her work impressions and stylistic approaches engendered by these diverse locales. Her art takes the form of diaristic notations, glimpses at aspects of these places that have made an enduring impact on her. Manhattan’s angular rooftops dominate many of the works, often sharing real or imagined space with the steeply ascending, craggy mountains of China, which she visited last year.

In an eloquent series of oil stick and pastel drawings, Murray renders both types of landscape in an equally crisp, flat manner, using a zesty palette of orange, blue and black. In her larger paintings, Murray combines personal symbols according to a more elusive logic, interweaving urban America’s solid geometric forms with the Chinese mountains, painted in atmospheric, dripping oil washes reminiscent of traditional Chinese landscape painting.

The surreal merging of such vastly unlike elements also characterizes Murray’s constructions, which employ similar painted imagery, applied to the surface of record albums, a skateboard and a sled. Among these, only a small, Cornell-like box (“The Last Walk”) matches the poignancy of the paintings and drawings.

In “Amphibolos,” Wasil’s series of color photographs, female figures are submerged in a slow and silent underwater world. The prominent grain in the 20-by-30-inch prints embodies the water’s reflective qualities, its richness and transience. The figures, in postures ranging from fetal self-embrace to balletic extension, are blurred by their movement within the fluid environment. Their contours dissolve into the water’s glinting depths.

These are elegant, mysterious works, especially “Untitled No. 6,” in which a woman surges forward, her arms thrust behind her and nearly lost in shadow. With chest bare and drapery clinging to her waist and legs, she embodies all of the grace and power of the Nike of Samothrace, a monument of ancient Greek sculpture.

The image earned Wasil an honorable mention last year in the Photography Awards Exhibition co-sponsored by the Reader newspaper and the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, and it shines here as well. In several of the Amphibolos photographs, Wasil’s intentions seem to float as aimlessly as the submerged figures within them. Most of them, however, demonstrate that Wasil has defined a territory rich with visual and sensual suggestion.

Erika Suderberg’s photo-series, “Displayed Termination--Lobby Cards,” on view at Anuska Galerie (2400 Kettner Blvd.) through June 30, deals with euphemisms, official-sounding phrases used by the government to disguise distasteful realities. Each work consists of two square images, either two black and white photographs or one photograph and one colored panel with applied text.

Suderberg’s verbal and visual repertoire and her general strategy of disclosure recall the work of Deborah Small. But where Small delivers an effective two-step punch, first drawing one in with familiar cliches, then revealing the horror underlying their harmless veneer, Suderberg returns a stare with another blank stare.

The images she makes and the words she chooses remain remote and untouchable. Rather than attack the system of verbal camouflage, Suderberg’s series succumbs to its superficial charms. In a few cases, this proves affecting: “Permanent Pre-Hostility” clarifies and strengthens the irony of its title with a second phrase, “word peace.” “Whole Days on the Stairs” evokes sensations of anxiety, tension and suspense through the repetition of an image looking up a dank stairway at a nervous young executive.

Most of the photographs and words that Suderberg uses are less concrete in their implications, and much less involving. In “Black World Gift,” for instance, a murky photograph of a man holding a bouquet of tiny electric tree lights is paired with a solid black square. The title runs beneath the image and, further below, it is defined as the “name given to the ‘Star Wars’ research ‘community’ by its members.” Here, as in most of the show, Suderberg draws attention to euphemistic jargon by placing the terms in quotes, but then fails to comment on it or enrich her cynical stance with images and compositions of equal intensity.