Workworkworkworkwork, a mid-career survey of artist Charles LeDray on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, represents the exhibition's third and final incarnation following lauded appearances at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art and the originating organization, Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. Yet the MFAH is more than a host to a traveling exhibition.

In its Houston setting, LeDray's 6,000 small scale fragments of handmade suits, hats and animals appear all the more diminutive amid the museum's soaring Mies van der Rohe-designed Cullinan Hall.

"We've taken our largest gallery and put a very reductive scale into it," explains curator of contemporary art Alison de Lima Greene. She attributes the allocation of the museum's main hall to the visionary late museum director, Peter Marzio. "When I went into his office with this proposal, I could see the gears moving in his mind. The museum is planning a third building devoted to modern and contemporary art collections, and as Peter and I discussed that, we wanted to challenge ourselves in the way we display art."

The exhibition reflects an artist's lifetime spent making miniature artworks by hand out of human bone, clay and cloth. LeDray's preciseness in conceiving street market tableaus or a Village People-inspired hat collection is immediately evident, but once one is immersed in the exhibition, it is the psychological resonance that is even more striking than the artist's obsessive fabrication.

Take "Milk and Honey," a tall glass prism composed of six shelves, each littered with hundreds of carefully arranged miniature glazed porcelain vessels detailed with a miniscule stylus. Hovering above the hall's motley terrazzo floors and basked in the gallery's distinctive northern light, the objects come alive as the most faint rainbows ripple across the wheel-spun, anthropomorphic pots.

As the initial fascination with the work's bounty fades, the magnitude of LeDray's devotion to his craft sets in. As a testament to the act of artistic creation and inspiration for infinite gazing, "Milk and Honey" is among the show's most moving works.

"The idea of being a spectator in the gallery is absolutely at the core of the exhibition," de Lima Greene explains.

This concept is most apparent in such installations (what the curator calls "episodes") as "Mens Suits," which represents different sections of a resale clothing shop. To actually view the vignettes, the spectator has to crouch onto the terrazzo floors to see the stacks of miniature, castoff T-shirts and reassembled ties. Otherwise, the museum visitor gets only a bird's eye view of the "store's" ceiling, including fake bits of dust and mothballs (actual pencil shavings) inside fluorescent lighting fixtures, which are realistically outfitted with varying qualities of light.

"There's a certain artifice in art galleries that everything is at some sort of idealized eye level. The standard is about 58 inches," de Lima Greene says. "Charles asks you to abandon that level of expectation, to bend over and examine."

Such examination proves rewarding in the exhibition's title track, workworkworkworkwork, composed of 588 mixed media objects in a line on the gallery floor. Each tableau is a mini market of detritus displayed on a blanket in the manner of a New York street vendor. LeDray debuted the installation in 1991 in Manhattan's Astor Place, which at the time was known for such mercantilism. Each vignette has the potential to encapsulate a life — I dare a viewer to scan the Lilliputian ephemera and not locate a piece of personal significance.

Somehow, in such miniature scale, the life processes and personal identities that these seemingly mundane objects represent appear more vital than ever before.

Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork is on view through Sept. 11.