The new Little Black Book exhibit at the Johnson Museum has ushered in the lonely, evocative reality of contemporary artist Peggy Preheim, whose pencilwork, sculpture and photography reflect each other in engaging ways. Preheim employs a diversity of mediums to generate a stylistically unified world that is nostalgic, haunting and as delicate as the lace-fringed Victorian dresses that clothe some of her ceramic-and-glass apparitions.

Preheim’s pencil drawings exhibit an incredible amount of detail for their scale; the images are almost thumbnails that seem to be either floating or disappearing into the center of a stark-white page. They are both distant and intimate, drawing the viewer into a fragmented reality that refuses to reveal all of itself, like selective memory. “Alexandria” (1996) is a suite of fourteen of these tiny drawings, which are perhaps snapshots of the subject’s childhood: a reflection in a streaked mirror, a winding road to a sunny destination, a bare shoulder blade in a dark room. One piece focuses on a pair of young hands with a lizard in their precarious grip, reflecting the dark curiosity and the sensation of power children feel as they hold creatures much smaller than themselves. The suite toggles between a sense of control and a sense of wonder, between playing God and attempting to understand the world.

American symbols are marvelously deconstructed as Preheim uses currency and baseballs as canvases for many of her fine pencil renderings. Armless dolls and porcelain fountains infuse and alter objects associated with memories from youth, dispelling their magic and shading them with personal experiences. “Ring” (2003) seems to be a departure from the other drawings in that the subject, a beaming woman who may have just been proposed to, bends toward the corner of the page as she is no longer the center of her own life. Overall, Preheim depicts a somewhat linear narrative of distorted childhoods and patriarchal dominance; she poses the visual argument that the occurrences which are supposed to be the cornerstones of life — birth, adolescence, engagement — are in fact its undoing.

Preheim’s sculptures further exhibit this theme; “Seed” (1989), a piece of stitched black leather, has the appearance of shriveled embryonic mass, while “Devolution” (1991-94), is a perturbing trio of unfired clay fetuses contorted to fit inside smooth glass prisons. Other ghost-white figures are carefully oriented inside oil lamps, as if on the brink of combustion. “Elis I and Elis II” is an antique bisque doll face split and mounted onto two busts. These forms complement each other in a broken sort of way: they are the images of functional duality, an unfortunate partition of the senses. Preheim’s photography, seen elsewhere in the exhibit, preserves gripping compositions of similar three-dimensional works, fashioning memories out of memories.

The exhibit is, in essence, a “Little Black Book” of anonymous recollections, a private and compelling volume of shrinking life-images, baby torsos, negative space and artful accidents. In this retrospective show, an arrangement of fragile, colorless materials reflects the fragility, the tragic and beautiful ephemerality of human life. Exquisite details in graphite, sculpture and film foster intimacy with cryptic subjects. Be careful not to look too closely, of course — many of the pieces are miniscule — or risk being tossed out by security.