You’d think there’d be a whole lot more of Taylor Davis’s sculptures around Boston these days. She’s the winner of the 2001 Institute of Contemporary Art’s Artist Prize and her contributions to the current ICA show, " Artists Imagine Architecture, " rank among the highlights of that ambitious exhibit. Davis’s work also forms half of a two-person show on the other side of town at the estimable Elias Fine Art. And keep in mind that this year’s recognition follows on her successful first solo exhibit a year ago at the Gallery @ Green Street.

When it comes to feeding one’s eyes on Davis, however, the ICA and EFA shows feel more like cocktail parties than meals: each establishment has exactly two of her works. (The Green Street show had more pieces than these two put together.) You may nibble, but you cannot eat.

At Elias Fine Art, the two untitled signature pieces attest to Davis’s masterful joining of unexpected elements: the prefabricated with the inventive, the raw with the refined, the found with the painstakingly cared for. She sculpts — or, more precisely, assembles — in planed, unstained, slightly finished two-by-fours, which she orchestrates into freestanding units reminiscent of many things yet resembling nothing. Packing crates, xylophones, troughs, and the backs of upright pianos are all suggested by the vertical line-up of identically sized wood. But Davis courts the ideas of the quotidian and the useful without actually kissing them. For all that her pieces resemble the familiar and the utilitarian, they turn out to be neither. And it is in that moment — when you think you know what you’re looking at and realize you don’t — that her work feels most alive, when unanticipated possibilities open up despite (not because of) your expectations.

The Elias pieces represent variations on the theme of narrow, upright, rectangular accordions of wood. Embedded mirrors and subtly uneven spacings of planks play with, and against, symmetry. One unit is about the length of a coffin, but skinny, and it stands on four squat two-by-four legs, so that it becomes a kind of altar, at once ungainly and slick. To look down the thin track of its top, however, is to be transported to the ceiling, since a recessed mirror is affixed to the length of the uppermost part of the structure. It’s like a lid that’s constantly bouncing your eyes into space. The only parallel examples where a mirrored surface crowns a confection of rippling wood are certain art deco objects, like vanities and bars. Davis’s work has the resonant ability, or the outright emotional range, to associate itself with periods and places, concepts and things, you wouldn’t expect to be reminded of.

At the ICA, the two Davis works, one upright and big as a bear cage, the other low-slung and suitcase-size, occupy the two funkiest spaces — those peculiarly cropped, mezzanine-type landings on each of the downstairs flights to the left of the entrance. Of the two, the smaller achieves both exactitude and mystery, and its success sets a standard against which the larger structure falls somewhat short.

Pallet casts a stair-shaped reflection onto a wall that’s just beneath a set of stairs. Further, its coordination of even and uneven elements registers as musical; if Davis’s vertical constructions recall harps and accordions, this one’s a keyboard, flat and varied and inevitably seen from above. Seven identical rectangular mirrors — six on one side, one on the other — flank a similar-sized but rough plank of wood. The eight elements have been spaced on a wooden rise just an inch or so from the floor to form a near-square. Somehow the spaces between the mirrors and the wood plank recall the floors of attics where you’re not meant to walk.

With Pallet, Davis also permits something that you won’t see in her other work: a curve. The solitary plank surrounded by mirrors hasn’t been planed at the center but rather bends like a body part or tree, so that all the industrial-looking apparatus feels as if it were in the service of the natural — that is, the unpremeditated and unforeseen.

The untitled larger construction enjoys a degree of this playfulness and delight. As you walk around it, you realize that though thin mirrors line the inside of the columns, sometimes you can see yourself and sometimes you can’t. Davis has arranged the tall vertical slats in such a way that they appear evenly spaced even though in fact they aren’t; to circle the structure is to phase in and out of focus with your own reflection. It’s as if the artist were saying that only occasionally do mirrors let us see who we are. Unfortunately, she has given the work a buzz cut, shearing it off 12 or so feet above ground. This decision feels willful. It’s a site-specific work, and I couldn’t help thinking she’d missed a chance to take advantage of a nearby arched window in the way that Pallet took advantage of its proximity to a set of stairs. That said, I found myself wishing for more of Taylor Davis and the idiosyncratic beauty she’s achieved.

Idiosyncratic beauty describes a show of a very different kind at the Berenberg Gallery, in the South End, where the poignant black-and-white photographs of Carlota Duarte manage to be both humble and towering. A member of a Catholic religious order who went on to found the Chiapas Photography Project in Mexico, Duarte moved to the South End in 1974. As she puts it, she began taking pictures of her neighbors as a way to introduce herself, and in the course of those introductions she met Odella. In an essay introducing her portraits of Odella, which span almost 20 years, Duarte describes her subject as an abused, impoverished, marginalized soul whose survival has always teetered between independence and institutions, between boarding houses and mental hospitals.

Duarte says in the essay that she was amazed to discover in her first visit to Odella’s apartment that Odella had props and costumes and wigs on hand for the photo shoot. What she doesn’t say is what we discover as viewers: Odella’s accouterments prove to be vehicles that deliver her from pretense. These pictures boast an unflinching emotional clarity. Odella is neither wise nor courageous, and she’s certainly not beautiful. She is, however, fully aware of her self: plucky, open, sensual, forlorn. She hides nothing, neither her sagging body nor her aspirations to beauty. And despite the settings of these portraits — primarily Odella’s orderly, sad apartment with its vinyl upholstery and pictures of beefcake boys and Hershey-bar wrappers taped to the walls — her lack of physical beauty ends up being eclipsed by her dignity. Having lived her entire life embattled, Odella has no vocabulary for and no gesture to suggest defeat.

The Berenberg is Boston’s only art gallery devoted to the work of unschooled artists, however you choose to identify them ( " naive " and " outsider " are also popular terms). In keeping with that mission, the gallery has interspersed Duarte’s photos with watercolor self-portraits by Odella herself, raw, indelicate, childish, exuberant works. I doubt Odella’s paintings could stand on their own — they’re less about being expressive than, I suspect, about demonstrating to the photographer her own creative ability. But as the backdrop to Duarte’s images, they contribute to a fine, under-recognized exhibit.