To describe or judge art according to its materials is an approach more associated with the crafts — clay, wood, glass, fiber and metal — than with state-of-the art contemporary expressions. Yet freelance curator Fionn Meade's group show at Kirkland Arts Center, "Release & Capture: Contemporary Paperworks," does just that. The question is, does this approach serve or demean the art?

Six young artists, ages 25 to 30, have impressive backgrounds, and several have attended top art schools in the U.S. and abroad, but do they share anything more than working with paper? Viewers will decide, but the exhibit is definitely worth seeing. Fresh and clear with innovative, individual talents on view, "Release & Capture" is a great introduction to some of the area's most engaging talents.

DIRK PARK Dawn Cerny's "And Then Released Again (Detail)" (2005), graphite on wall.

Saul Becker is a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va., but he already has a substantial track record. The five ink-and-watercolor drawings are crisp, clean and linear. Urban scenes of buildings and fantasy architectural structures, they also toy with dripping paint, pre-printed graph paper and skewed perspectives.

Like Becker and the others, Mary Simpson's large etchings point toward important things to come. Isolated gray figures are separated from Victorian building facades and other street-scene fragments, all tiny elements on enormous sheets pulled through an etching press. Inflated in scale rather than intimate, they expose vast stretches of empty white paper, all the better to undo relations among the various images.

With a background in creative writing rather than art, Simpson studied printmaking at Pratt Fine Arts Center with two of the other artists, Claire Cowie and Perri Lynch. Their work tends toward the sparse, too. Cowie's watercolors of cheerful scenes combine cut-up paper, woodcut fragments and watercolors of village life, tastefully arranged on more giant-size pieces of white paper. A mobile of paper figures fashioned from Cowie's old prints, "Villagers in Flight II" (2005), fails in its transition from small-scale print to large-scale hanging sculpture. This might be connected to her general working method of recycling studio generated paper works in numerous ways, but this attempt seems less successful.

DIRK PARK Gretchen Bennett's "McSweeney's 15" (2005), Con-Tact paper.

Marc Dombrowsky best fills Meade's curatorial theme, the "now" nature of using paper. The Tacoma resident obsessively embroiders over the lettering and labels of other people's cast-off wastebasket contents. Alternately voyeuristic and fetishistic, Dombrowsky's formal talents are exposed in two atypical works, two untitled "blueprints" (2005). Blue thread traces a "plan" on each gleaming white sheet of paper. They're displayed on low pedestals, where they falter as three-dimensional objects or assemblages. They'd look better framed and on the wall. Maybe Dombrowsky will pursue the blueprint idea and give other people's private papers a rest from his maniacal interventions.

Gretchen Bennett studied at Rutgers University and the Prague Academy of Applied Arts after her Fulbright year there in ñ996. She's a "Dumpster diver," too, painstakingly turning scraps of paper detritus into awkward wall assemblages. For "Release & Capture," however, she turned to Con-Tact paper, the ubiquitous self-adhesive shelf paper with a phony wood grain pattern. The little birds arranged on the walls are too cute by half, but her larger abstract composition, "McSweeney's ñ5" (2005), is commanding, just small enough to tease the viewer into wanting something bigger.

Nearby, Dawn Cerny's wall-mounted bird relief, "And Then Released Again" (2005), fills the space with dozens of printed and cutout birds in flight. Much more interesting is how she moves beyond a framed print of a prison scene, out of the frame, to continue the image of the prison onto the gallery wall. Violating a convention of the sealed-in, framed print, Cerny hints at what could be even more challenging: an entire room or wall of her precise, elegant pencil drawings.