"The Book Borrowers: Contemporary Artists Transforming the Book," at BAM

Books as pillars. Books as sculpture. Books as just about anything, in fact, except something to read.

Much of the work on display in the Bellevue Arts Museum's new exhibit, "The Book Borrowers: Contemporary Artists Transforming the Book," is rich, provocative and even beautiful.

Yet the very premise of its existence can't help but perturb any lifelong book lover. After all, a book was destroyed — sometimes many books, including whole encyclopedia sets — to make each artwork assembled here.

Curator Nora Atkinson agrees that the show — the first she has organized — is unsettling: "It's kind of transgressive to alter a book." What comes out of the process, she adds, had better be better than the original.

In several instances, that's the case. If I had a vintage set of Encyclopedia Britannica volumes, I doubt I would do what Canadian artist Guy Laramée has done with them — but I can't deny that what he's done is remarkable.

In "La Grande Bibliothèque" ("The Big Library") a whole Grand Canyon — complete with ledges, crevices, rock bridges, promontories and caves — has been constructed from sandblasted volumes of the Britannica. The dense, sedimentary character of accumulated pages is a perfect counterpart to the sandstone sediment layers you see exposed in Southwest desert canyons.

Laramée's "Pétra" — again created from sandblasted encyclopedias, here touched up with reddish pigment — is a replica of the renowned Jordanian archaeological site, while "(Techtonique 4) Toute les idées se ressemblent" takes slanted dictionary tomes as fodder for a craggy mountain landscape, with stone strata on an angle as you sometimes see them in the Rockies. The effect is striking, although some might argue that the subtitle ("All ideas resemble one another") is reductive.

Long-Bin Chen is another standout in the show — and one whose alteration of books isn't as problematic as Laramée's. His "Guan Ying with Flower Crown (Ming Dynasty)" looks, from a distance, like a bust of the Buddhist goddess of compassion carved from mottled marble.

Investigate more closely and you'll see she's actually made from Manhattan telephone directories. The grayness of the type and the off-white color of the paper are what give the piece its seductive appearance of worn, discolored stone from the front. Step in back of it, and you're just staring at a stack of phone-book spines.

Chen's "Sleeping Buddha," made of books and magazines, is an even more ambitious piece: a half body laid out on a mirrored surface to create the illusion of a whole. The figure's hips appear almost lathe-turned, while other parts of the body — the head, the feet — are meticulously sculpted.

Brian Dettmer employs a similar sculptural approach, using scalpels, tweezers and surgical instruments (as Atkinson reveals) to perform "autopsies" on illustrated reference books.

He doesn't begin by leafing through the volumes to find the images he's after. Instead he glues the pages shut, then painstakingly "excavates" his way toward maps, illustrations, snippets of text. Relying half on chance and half on intuition, he delivers three pieces that couldn't feel more elaborately or deliberately orchestrated.

Not all the work in "The Book Borrowers" is at this level. Among the five local contributors, James Allen's "excavated" books go furthest in creating obsessive little microcosms (from books on alchemy, the Enlightenment and "The Church of Our Fathers"). Other pieces, both local or from as far away as Texas or the U.K., give you pause. Would you rather have the artwork, or the book that was destroyed?

A pun-packed piece at the entrance of the show, however, reminds us that destruction is entailed in the creation of books themselves. Jacqueline Rush Lee's "Core: Cross Section View Slice: Volumes Series" is comprised of a dozen or more tomes, including something by presidential adviser and historian Ted Sorensen (the title has been wiped out). All are crushed into a fat slab of "log." The page edges are a burlesque of tree rings; the outer red binding is a gaudy bark.

Point taken.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com