Wilshire Center

Search for Meaning: In John Frame’s newest batch of miniature carved comedic dramas, the soul’s search for meaning continues. The small dioramas are impeccably crafted and the tiny Punchinello-type figures captivating. Part puppet, part spectral effigy, each effortlessly mimes its part in the silent theater of Frame’s constructions.

But this time around the scenarios and the figures venture outside the safety of fine craft and Renaissance Italian art into less civilized, more archetypal ground. Playing off found objects and unmanipulated natural materials, several figures are left raw, like stick dolls, with only hands or faces developed for stark contrast. In “My Sebastian/If I Fade,” the juxtaposition between the delicately carved, hole-riddled saint spiked with a woodsman’s wedge in his voice box and the two crude wood spirits haunting the tree branch he’s tied to sets up a fascinating narrative about faith, death and nature’s primal forces.

In sharp contrast with Frame’s heavy ruminations are Mieke Gelley’s delicate, abstract color field washes that mix printmaking and watercolor on one image. Technically inviting and sensuously colored, they hint at botanical associations but don’t push the innuendo anywhere. Most interesting are the blocks of dense color crushed into thin translucent paper. Here the vague watery blots and spare organic forms seem importantly solid against the yellowish, rose water atmospheres. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to March 3.)