The precisely lit gallery highlighting the work of Michele Oka Doner. All photos courtesy of the Perez Art Museum Miami.

The gallery at the Pérez Art Museum Miami is darkened, and the lighting is very dim. Spotlights highlight the two-toned prints made from organic material on the walls, while overhead lighting makes the dual platforms supporting dozens of artworks sparkle, due to the minerals in the iron used to make them.

The installation of Michele Oka Doner’s small but mesmerizing survey reflects beautifully the work of this internationally acclaimed artist, whose roots run deep in Miami.

That the exhibit, titled “Michele Oka Doner: How I Caught a Swallow in Midair,” resembles an archaeological site is also fitting. For five decades Oka Doner has collected natural objects from the seas and woods, and researched ancient myths and societies, in order to create her art. The former director of PAMM who organized the show, Thom Collins, aptly likened the body of her work to “Wunderkammer,” those cabinets of curiosity from the Age of Discovery, where artists and explorers displayed artifacts, relics and fossils gathered from their travels.

As we see when slowly taking in this exhibit, Oka Doner’s artifacts as artworks play with perception–is that a real seashell, or a ceramic imitation? Those blurred portraits on the wall appear like charcoal drawings, but are in fact made up of leaves and tiny twigs. Her unique combination of incorporating materials from the natural and man-made worlds, with whispers of mythologies, is what has propelled her to the global art stage.

Miamians may know her best from “A Walk on the Beach,” the half-mile walkway at Miami International Airport that mimics that seaside walk, where we encounter marine life, coral and shells, except at the airport it is reproduced with bronze and epoxy terrazzo. Another shimmering public art work, “Radiant Site,” covers New York’s Herald Square subway station, and her art resides in the collections of the Met, Whitney and Art Institute of Chicago, among many other institutions.

“Seeds and Pods” from 1977-78; white stoneware raku.

On this day before the opening at PAMM, Oka Doner is still arranging her archaeological art site. In a long Grecian-like robe and sandals–a distinctive look she has made her own–Oka Doner is moving objects around the room like it were a chess board, and talking about the origins of art, of community, of spiritual beliefs, of human interaction with the environment. Her well of knowledge and almost timeless presence fills the gallery, and it becomes clear that trying to separate her life from her art is impossible.

Oka Doner was raised in Miami Beach in the 1950s, when she roamed the neighborhood with its giant banyan trees and unpopulated beaches, picking up “the flotsam and jetsam of life.” The tropical storms, the smell of fires from the Everglades also impacted her childhood. “All the senses are engaged here in Miami,” she said. She channeled it into art, and left to study at the University of Michigan, when she would also start to delve into Japanese, Chinese, Islamic and African cultures.

The earliest pieces in the exhibit reflect some of that Eastern influence, porcelain works from the 1960s. From clay she moved on to bronze, silver, glass and numerous other materials, while mixing in the organic–or seeming to. One stunning example is a chair of thrones, “Bramble,” from 1990. The little seat appears to be made of branches, but it is bronze. The same is true with 1997’s “Burning Bush.” A 2007 vase looks like a glass bowl set in coral, but the base is again a delicately crafted bronze.

The large gray-brown figures on paper that frame these “artifacts” in the middle of the room are not painted or drawn, rather are described as “relief prints from organic matter.” They can seem sinister at first, murky forms emerging from the frame; but they have a primal attraction. The titles “Adam from Roots” and “Birth of Adam” pull us into origin myths when facing sketchy figures created from products of the earth-like twigs.

Looking over this artistic archaeological site are portraits, with literal and metaphorical roots.

The exhibit is both complex, like the mind of the artist, and strikingly simple. There are no obvious signifiers of movements–post-modern, conceptual, pop–they exist in an almost ephemeral place.

That might be why Oka Doner was chosen by the Miami City Ballet to reinterpret the sets and costumes for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the pinnacle performance in March of the ballet’s 30th anniversary season. Oka Doner took Shakespeare’s tale, transformed into dance by George Balanchine in 1962, from the forest and submerged it into the ocean, using gorgeous imagery to create a fluid, dreamy, otherworldly atmosphere.

Yet, Oka Doner and this exhibit remain grounded, by reverence for the real world under our feet. As she pulled out more flotsam and jetsam, that may or may not be arrowheads or bones, and which may or may not be displayed in the end, she related a story about some of her acquisitions. When digging around sea grass looking for specimens, beach officials approached her and asked what she was doing. “I had all my teeth, so I guess they didn’t think I was a bag lady. They let me continue.”

As she summed up, her world is a big fish net.

“Michele Oka Doner: How I Caught a Swallow in Midair” runs through Sept. 11 at the Perez Art Museum Miami.