At once deeply personal and universal, the notion of spirit is often invoked a bit too charitably, a kind of catchall that's used to describe virtually anything that moves us. But in the hands of artists for whom spirit is a central concern, the discriminating factor becomes not so much what moves us but how and why virtually anything could.

A pair of shows at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art bring this intuitively volatile world of spirit into sharper focus.

"Anima Umbra," a solo show by Louisiana native Kelli Scott Kelley, seems grounded in the evolving perceptions of childhood as unmediated mystery is processed into coextensive (and occasionally disturbing) understanding.

"Imaging the Spirit," a photography show curated by Judy Hussie-Taylor — and featuring work by Jamaican-born Albert Chong, a University of Colorado associate professor; and Cuban artists (and husband and wife) Juan Carlos Alom and Cirenaica Moreira — pushes into even darker territory, but one permeated by an acute awareness of the specters of history and ritual that hover above and lurk below the surface of everyday reality.

Kelly's unmounted canvases, sometimes circular or arranged like early Renaissance triptychs, serve as vehicles for her oddly colored and generally perspectiveless imagery. There's usually a narrative thrust, but the real tension is between story and memory, and between archetype and composition.

In "Swarm," a figure with bee wings — presumably a mother — seems to be surveying the progress of her son's transformation from boy to bee man. There's something simultaneously homey and cautionary about the scene, a right of passage that evokes both Disney and Icarus. Animal-like figures in other pieces — mice, pigs and apes, to name a few — resonate along a similar spectrum: one that starts with cute anthropomorphism and ends with something along the lines of Art Spiegelman's "Maus."

But what's on the canvases is only the beginning. Process is not only explicit in "Anima Umbra," it's essential. This extends from the simple but effective installation, in which several pieces and their respective studies are juxtaposed, to the canvases themselves, the surfaces of which are sometimes stitched together and covered with the text of letters sent to and by Kelly over the course of her life.

In either case, some form of past experience becomes the literal or symbolic canvas upon which any future perceptions are rendered. In a way, whatever depth is lost in the flat depiction of much of Kelly's imagery is more than regained by our understanding of where it came from.

Chong's work, which fills BMoCA's east gallery, seems to expand on Kelly's somewhat domestic sense of personal history, reaching back generations instead of mere years. As the color largely disappears from the exhibition space — beyond a few sepia-toned prints, none of the photographers has any color work here — a sort of racial memory takes over, blurring past, cosmologically charged iconography and present political context. And for Chong, born in Jamaica of Chinese-African descent, that cultural mix is as rich as it is far-flung.

The basic form of much of Chong's work seems something of a cross between altar and still life, some of which involve rephotographing earlier prints as part of elaborately constructed tableaus while others are elegantly composed time exposures, documents of ceremonial smoke as it's blown across the frame. And his offerings — pictures of his father, his passport, shells, fruit, feathers, egg shells, animal skulls and dead birds among them — recombine mysteriously into scatterings of earthly remains that read like history and touch something deep in our souls.

Where Kelley and Chong more or less invite us to share in their exploratory revelations, the work of Alom and Moreira, shown together in the smaller Union Works Gallery upstairs, makes us aware that what's being shared has a bit more of an edge.

In Moreira's "Metlica" series, the artist's body is roughly and mechanically intermingled with assorted, seemingly medieval metal objects — a welded globe stands in for a pregnant belly; a single bare arm dangles at the side of an iron dress frame. In Alom's "Ablucon para el libro Oscuro" series (from which most of work here comes), bodies and limbs are smeared with dirt and grime or half-hidden behind a block of wood with metal spikes poking out of it.

What's explicit here is a kind of palpable awareness not of the things that we expect to facilitate the nurturing of spirit, but precisely the sorts of things that test such nurturance. And in the crucible of such experience, we make our own light.

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