I've always hated the decorative arts sections of museums. Exquisite objects caged in glass leave me cold. I hate the handicraft sections of farmers markets even more. It's hard not to have traumatic flashbacks to the age of macrame in which I grew up.

As usual the keen curation of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston forces me to reconsider. Valerie Cassel Oliver curated its recent show, Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft, which runs through July 25 with a host of talks and performances designed to interrogate the relationship we gloss over when we use the casual phrase "arts and crafts."

The artists on display at CAMH deploy a shocking array of homespun materials to put a cosmopolitan and sometimes bizarre spin on craft, making mute materials perform. On entering the museum, you hardly know where to look: Each display seems so familiarly strange, with everyday items involved in the strangest of stunts. And many artists experiment with sound, so there's a whole cacophony to experience as well.

The show is small enough to spend time with all the works, but a few of the most captivating and disturbing deserve special commendation. I know it's not awards season, but let's offer some "Cammies" for endeavors in the service of art.

The "Cammie" for the most visually arresting works is a solid tie between Lauren Kalman and Nick Cave. Their works are nothing alike. Kalman's Hard Wear presents a row of mostly cropped head shots in which a range of decorative materials — gilding, pearls and gems — are fixed to the face, forced into the mouth or nostrils, painted on the tongue, or inching toward the vulnerable ears. The body takes new shapes in the process, sometimes gorgeous, sometimes grotesque.

You can't help thinking about how attempting to adorn the body actually deforms us. Beauty knows no pain, as any beautician will tell you. Nick Cave doesn't work only in images. The textures of his Untitled (Soundsuits) provide tricked out and tripped out body wear that makes flesh a means of creating sound. The two most amazing suits offer us a pair of legs in bold prints over which is set an apparatus that would mostly or entirely obscure the face.

One features a host of birds that seem to have built a nest of string and other found items around the suit. The other suit presents a veritable halo of jack-in-the-boxes jutting out at all angles. If you want to see these suits come alive just make your way to the Brown Auditorium of the MFAH on Thursday at 6:30 p.m., when Cave will perform his unique magic in person.

The "Cammie" for the absolutely oddest thing I've seen in a very long time (and perhaps ever) goes to Saya Woolfalk, who also wins the award for the name most appropriate to a show about craft. A few years ago, Woolfalk began to imagine a future post-environmental world populated by plant-human hybrids.

When you imagine this in your head, for "plants" substitute "fabrics" and what you get is a flirtation with utopia that seems utterly alien to the common materials deployed. In a small almost claustrophobic room you'll be treated to a wholly handcrafted environment called No Place (a literal translation of the work "utopia").

If stuffed animals had a home planet, it would be this room. You can settle in on the green grass amid strange creatures escaped from some nightmare of childhood and watch Ethnography of No Place, a film that witnesses the rituals and ceremonies of these bulbous fabric creatures.

The "Cammie" for the ballsiest (and funniest) artwork is a slam dunk for glass artist Ryan Gothrup. A wheeling cart for basketballs, populated by three balls, seems so innocently propped against the wall. Next to it, we're treated to a video of a performance piece.

When I say performance piece I'm referring to a pickup game played on a real court with a mixture of real and glass basketballs that are indistinguishable. Predictably, the glass balls smash on the ground. Like all good humor, this piece is still incredibly funny in spite of being predictable. After the balls start smashing on the court, the even funnier trash talk begins: "Where's your f@!ing vacuum cleaner, man? Clean that up!"

The Adaptation "Cammie" for the most (sadly) self-referential artwork goes to Sabrina Gschwandtner's Crochet Film. A remarkable amount of gallery space is taken up stringing a film 58 feet long that depicts the crocheting of a replica "film" made of yarn, which itself hangs across from the "real" film on its own spools. You can move up close and watch in a small square three minutes of the "real film," which represents the 10 hours Gschwandtner spent producing her yarn metafilm.

Maybe the time could have been better spent.

A close second place in this category would be Conrad Bakker, whose Untitled: Book-of-the-Month Club features handcrafted and painted simulacra of books a little too reminiscent of the work of Steve Wolfe now on view at the Menil. The jury's still out on Wolfe for me, but his execution is far superior.

And it's not clear how many art pieces made as replicas of books the world can support. I did, however, like Bakker's choice of titles, including Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show, William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, and the tasty Whole Earth Cookbook.

We could award a Blast from the Past "Cammie" to the video of James Melchert's 1972 performance in which participants were covered in clay only to sit until it dried.

And the participants deserve a Patience of the Saints "Cammie" for taking part. And Cat Chow receives the special Enron Award for making a gorgeous evening dress out of 1,000 shredded $1 bills. If you donate a dollar, you can help CAMH acquire their own version of the gown for the permanent collection

Art seems a better investment than energy, especially of late. Really, there's not enough time to speak of all of what intrigues about the show. And it can be frustrating to see recorded performances rather than real ones, so make sure you check out the incredible schedule of events.

What's wonderful about Hand+Made is that even work that inspires skepticism stays with you. The exhibit makes the familiar and intimate materials we rely on seem oddly alive. After Hand+Made, you might look differently at your clothes, your couch or your cookware.