In her latest show, renowned Brazilian artist Jac Leirner once again uses decals to get our attention.

Dozens of clear, flat plastic bags full of stickers, grouped by color, shape, or subject, cover several tables in the first-floor gallery of the Miami Art Museum, where the artist Jac Leirner is preparing to create a new work. Leirner points out a pack of multicolored spheres bearing the logo of Sao Paulo's Museum of Modern Art, a group of ''I love . . . '' bumper stickers (you know, the ones with the heart) pledging allegiance to various places and passions, cartoon drawings of anthropomorphic bananas, and pictures of bagels with cream cheese. She picks up a black and white decal that says ''Endangered Feces.'' The stickers serve as the palette from which the artist will create Adhesive 44, plastering them in geometric configurations on two 34-foot-long sliding windows mounted on frames in the center of the gallery.

''These are all drugs,'' says Leirner, holding up a bag containing varied stickers with pictures of marijuana leaves. ''These are from museums and galleries. These are rock bands: Here are the Brazilian ones. And here we have nature, animals, fruit.'' She takes a loose pile from the table, sifting through some airline stickers and one of a girl on a skateboard. ``Oh, these are things with wheels. And here's the orange, pink, red, and yellow ones.''

Leirner notes that in her native Sao Paulo, stickers are emblematic of the urban landscape, pasted on cars, covering the windows of teenagers' rooms, and creating anarchic collages on the bathroom doors of the city's many music clubs. She has been collecting them since the 1980s, when, as a young artist soon to make a splash on the international art scene, she was attracted to their possibilities as material for her provocative and unexpectedly elegant artworks, in which she typically uses ephemera to construct clean-lined abstract compositions. As the name implies, Adhesive 44 is the 44th work she's made using stickers.

'You can have a sticker with a picture of Einstein on it and beside it a little monster, `fragile' stickers from packing crates next to skulls, or a highly designed logo next to a plain price tag sticker,'' she says of her sticker works. ``There are some rules [to arranging the decals in the work]: It might be by reds, blacks, horizontals . . . ''

Wearing a camouflage T-shirt, pinstriped black pants, and black sneakers, Leirner, who was born in 1961, retains an air of student rebellion. She visibly delights in the stickers as an unbridled form of popular expression, and even, when created to express statements by artists like Jenny Holzer or On Kawara, as works of art unto themselves.

One of the most acclaimed young artists to emerge from Latin America in the late '80s, Leirner has since exhibited widely, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and other important venues. Those who have purchased her work include Miami collectors Craig Robins and Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz.

Growing up in Sao Paulo, Leirner wanted to be a musician, but settled on art, ''something that I could do while listening to music.'' She was attracted to the work of Paul Klee and his metaphysical theories of color and form, and was also drawn to the knowing absurdity of Dada works that questioned the definition of art. But most of all, she says, she has been inspired by previous generations of Brazilian artists, whose abstract and conceptual works pointedly depart from the painterly and primarily figurative traditions stereotypically associated with Latin American art.

The legacy of modern Sao Paulo artists' geometric abstract canvases can be seen in Leirner's precise arrangement of color and form, and her organic sensibility recalls the works of Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticia, artists who, in the '60s, encouraged audiences to infuse their abstract constructions with their own subjective interpretations. Leirner feels the most affinity for the work of artists of the '70s, particularly Cildo Meireles, known for his subversive art actions and installations that synthesize formal composition and social and political concerns.

Like other artists of her generation and before, Leirner has often looked to the art world for inspiration, creating works that comment upon the business of art and her own status as a successful contemporary artist. Materials she has used include business cards and her own correspondence with museums. Other works, in which she juxtaposes plastic bags bearing the logos of international museum stores to create a graphic ''canvas,'' she explains, ``come out of the museum as garbage and go back as art.''

Leirner shies away from socio-political interpretations of her own work, stressing that each material she chooses has distinct personal significance. This was particularly obvious when she fashioned one work out of three years worth of her own empty cigarette packs. Other works, in which she sewed devalued Brazilian paper currency into geometric shapes, held a particular significance for the public, but also referenced Meireles, who used Brazilian money as a medium in the '70s. (He stamped subversive messages on bills and put them back into circulation.)

''When I work with bank notes I'm not really thinking of the economy, although I'm dealing with it indirectly,'' Leirner claims. ``The economy's not the reason to do it, but the bank notes themselves are so charged with content I can't help it.''

As for the stickers, the artist says she's attracted to them not for their individual messages, but as an intriguing form of democratic design that ties together the members of what she calls society's ''tribes,'' be they punk fans, voters, or museum-goers.

''Stickers are objects of desire, they all have their own shapes, their own colors, their own style,'' says the artist, exiting the museum for a smoke. ``Some are in really bad taste, but they are connected to all of us; for one reason or another, we're drawn to them.''

Jac Leirner's Adhesive 44 opens Thursday, July 15, at the Miami Art Museum, 101 W. Flagler St., 305-375-3000. The opening reception, featuring music by DJ Le Spam, is from 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Leirner will give a talk about her work at 6:30 p.m. The show runs through October 10.