It’s no secret that many artworks begin life as drawings. Paintings emerge from sketches and doodles, sculptures start out as penciled-in shapes and volumes and even films and videos are mapped out on storyboards long before anyone ever picks up a camera. In that sense, drawings are to visual artists what dress rehearsals are to actors — a chance to work out the kinks and get things right.

Yet once the paintings and sculptures are finished, the sketches and drawings that inspired them are often cast aside. It’s the final product — not the tentative first step — that counts.

In their current exhibit (actually two mini-exhibits) at Providence’s 5 Traverse Gallery, the artists Lisa Perez and Peter Owen take a more balanced approach. Rather than making sketches and then discarding them later on, Perez and Owen try to preserve some of the freshness and immediacy of the sketch-making process in their finished works. At the same time, they eagerly embrace other art forms, ranging from sculpture and installation (Perez) to painting and architecture (Owen).

Perez, whose work fills the larger of the gallery’s two exhibit spaces, pays her respects to drawing in several ways. Like drawings, her small mixed-media sculptures and assemblages don’t take up much room. (Most, in fact, aren’t much bigger than the pages of a small sketchbook.) They’re also clearly and proudly handmade, with the occasional rough edge and off-kilter corner to prove it.

Perez, who earned her MFA at the University of California at Berkeley, is also a fan of drawing’s most popular platform: paper. Several works, including “Glacial Erratic,” an elegant little wall-construction whose fluid shapes evoke waves and wind currents, and an untitled piece featuring bubble-shaped cutouts, are made entirely of paper. Other works mix paper with other materials.

Yet despite their modest size and do-it-yourself style, Perez’s sculptures manage to conjure up a wide variety of real-world and art-world references. Organic shapes, for example, can be found in many of the show’s works, whether it’s the cluster of cell-like forms in “Law of Simplicity” or the tiny green paper sprig that seems to be sprouting from a strip of wood in “Spring.”

Other works, including the wonderful “Way Things Go” and the equally excellent “Yes and Yellow,” suggest 3-D Minimalist drawings. Meanwhile, fans of mid-century modern design may also detect a penchant for blobby 1950s-era shapes in Perez’s work. (The spiffy little wall-sculpture called “Elegance and Elephants,” for example, would make a great Eames-style coffee table.)

Like a good haiku (or a good drawing), Perez’s work has a visual and intellectual heft that belies its relatively modest scale. In her hands, less really is more.

Owen, meanwhile, is showing more of his off-kilter street scenes and cityscapes. A kind of urban hunter-gatherer, he has a knack for picking out details that most of us miss through boredom or inattention: the claw-like overhang of a street light, the water tower that looks vaguely like a giant lunar landing vehicle, the jumbled mass of buildings lining a busy street.

Owen then takes these details and weaves them into complex, almost cinematic drawings that suggest a mix of cubist collage and architectural renderings. A group of recent drawings and mixed media works — the results of an extended arts residency in Holland — are especially good.

“Lisa Perez: still even now” and “Peter Owen: Collected Stories” continues through Nov. 22 at the 5 Traverse Gallery, 5 Traverse St., Providence. Hours: Thurs.-Sun. noon-6. Contact: 278-4968 or visit www.5traverse.com.

If the current two-man show at Providence’s Lenore Gray Gallery seems more like a well-rehearsed duet than a pair of competing solos, there’s a reason for that.

The two contributors, sculptor John Udvardy and mixed-media specialist Varujan Boghossian, have a lot in common. Both, for example, are longtime college professors — Udvardy at the Rhode Island School of Design and Boghossian at Dartmouth College — who also happen to be friends. And both take a similar approach to their work, with Udvardy conjuring up elegant cubist-style sculptures out of cast-off bits of wood and metal and Boghossian turning vintage magazine ads and illustrations into playfully surrealistic collages.

In both cases, it’s a kind of visual alchemy — the creation of something new and magical out of the most mundane materials — that makes these pieces work.

In “Gandy Dancer Strut,” for example, Udvardy takes the kind of household flotsam that you might find in a recycle bin — a hollow cardboard tube, some rough-cut pieces of lath, a few hunks of wooden molding — and turns them into a jaunty free-standing sculpture.

Boghossian, meanwhile, has a knack for offbeat juxtapositions, like the dragonfly that hovers over a conga line of apples in “After the Chinese,” and the bouquet of flowers that sits, incongruously yet somehow appropriately, on the face of an Old Master portrait in “Dutch Still Life.”

Through Nov. 26 at the Lenore Gray Gallery, 15 Meeting St., Providence. Hours Mon.-Fri. 10-5 or by appt. Contact: 274-3900.

bvansicl@projo.com