The Book Borrowers

The Seattle Art Museum has acquired over a billion dollars' worth of new art within the last two years as a result of a recent expansion and redesign that proved to the world how seriously Seattle takes its art. The main museum was enlarged (and much of its charm removed) and SAM created a waterfront sculpture garden that has proved very popular. SAM and the related Seattle Asian Art Museum produce and host several worthy traveling shows annually. Another gem, Seattle's Frye Art Museum, presents not only its enjoyable permanent collection all year round (at no cost to visitors, even providing free parking) but also offers several smaller, well-curated exhibitions at any particular time. The very traditional 19th century mitteleuropean focus of the Frye's permanent collection at the museum's physical center is always a wonderful contrast to the quirky exhibitions that fill the outer galleries.

Seattle also has several gallery districts around town where one can see the work of hundreds of artists whose work hasn't made its way into many museums yet. Tacoma 45 minutes south has an enjoyable art museum just a five-minute walk from the popular Museum of Glass (and right near the excellent Washington State History Museum, which sometimes showcases art as well), so locals might wonder why they ought to cross Lake Washington from Seattle or drive up to the Eastside from Tacoma to go to the Bellevue Arts Museum, which is nestled in the middle of Bellevue's vast downtown shopping district, something for which the suburban stronghold is better known. What can the 'burbs offer that art-minded urbanites would find worth seeing?

Plenty. The Bellevue Arts Museum is different from other area art museums in that its focus is on design, craft and works that have often been considered less important than so-called fine art pieces. The permanent collection includes pieces by artists from the Northwest's famous Pilchuck Glass School, which was cofounded by Dale Chihuly in 1971, but most of the rest of the museum's galleries feature exhibitions devoted to particular artists, styles or media. Impressive past shows have revolved around beadwork, ceramics, quilts, furniture, kimonos, assemblage, calligraphy, woodworking, the even an assortment of teapots, both modern and historical. One currently featured exhibition, on view until June 14, is "The Book Borrowers: Contemporary Artists Transforming the Book." This impressive exhibition of altered book art features not only works by Northwest artists but also pieces by other artists from further afield.

The first thing to greet a visitor to the collection is a life-size sleeping Buddha carved out of phone books by artist Long-Bin Chen. They form half the body while a mirror below them reflects the books, seemingly creating a whole Buddha who levitates or floats serenely in a sea of glass. (See here how he turned Sotheby's auction house catalogs into a large Buddha head in another show.) Elsewhere in the gallery, works by Georgia Russell were created with the help of a scalpel with which Russell eviscerates books, cutting ribbons and tendrils out of them that rise up and out of the center of each volume. Particularly delightful are works by James Allen, who creates dozens of layers of illustrations cut out of books that rise up from the pages.

One of my favorite artists on display is Seattle's own Casey Curran, who builds remarkable works of books, paper, found objects and wire with hand cranks that set the works in motion. Sadly, visitors are warned not to touch his works on display at BAM, but you can see his work in action by clicking on his name above, or click here to see five of his pieces on YouTube. When his work was on display in Seattle's Gallery IMA last year, the gallery allowed visitors to touch the pieces, and I had the pleasure of cranking some of them myself, which made a horse gallop and anemones open and close, among other things.

Artist Jenn Khoshbin cuts concentric circles out of books and folds them back or removes them to expose and feature particular illustrations hidden within each book. She also makes pop-ups out of books that were never intended to contain them. Okinawa-born Yuken Teruya cuts exquisitely detailed and fragile tree shapes out of paper and creates miniature tree-dotted landscapes within books, which are, of course, made of trees. Guy Laramée creates entire ancient buildings seemingly carved into rock walls by sandblasting the insides of volumes. The show also features encyclopedias sandblasted impressively into a monumental landscape reminiscent of the Grand Canyon.

The artists in this show take the idea of finding whole words within books very literally, carving away, burning, folding, bending, gluing, cutting and coloring books created for entirely different purposes until they submit to the will of the artist and take on whole new meanings that their writers and publishers never even imagined.

This exhibition is part of "Material Evidence," BAM's ongoing series of internally organized exhibitions. As the BAM website puts it, "At the core of these artists’ poetics of the handmade, there is the constant investigation and reassessment of the mutual influence among concepts, materials and processes. During the creative process, these artists are often open to the new ways of thinking, feeling and creating as suggested by the material growth of the work. Touching, shaping, cutting, burning, sewing, carving, accumulating, removing are not simply ways to define the volumetric and formal aspects of the artwork, but also participate in shaping and giving substance to the meaning of it."