Seattlest was admittedly skeptical about fiber arts. It sounds a little Metamucil. Then we saw On Mapping: New Perspectives with a Common Thread, now up at Bellevue Arts Museum.

It brought to mind the April 24 New Yorker piece about Mapquest (which could’ve also applied to Googlemaps), the gist of which was, back before Randy McNally mapped America, people used to get from A to B with these little photos flipbooks that showed mile markers along the way. They'd drive their Model T to the fork in the road near the giant weeping willow pictured in the flipbook, then make a left down toward the creek.

By giving drivers one unified, omniscient vision, cartographers changed everything. Maps made us kings of the road!

But now? TMI. Practically every inch of the earth is mapped, but who cares about context? We just want to get where we're going, with nothing to fold (which is why Seattlest once Mapquested a cross-country drive. No folding, but plenty of staples.).

Ok, so here's the art part. Like maps, the work of Linda Gass, Barbara Lee Smith, Toot Reid and Matthew Gerring are all abstractions of sorts, and together they question the grip maps have on reality.

We were captivated by Gass's panels, which are dyed and quilted to give a sense of topography. There's three renditions of the same place, but with vastly different colors that highlight the changes chemical effluent makes. Scary, but beautiful. One of them can be seen on the cover of this month's Fiber Arts magazine.

Gig Harbor artist Barbara Lee Smith's layered works are painted, stitched, and glued. At first they seem like a Puget Sound land- or seascape, but a closer look reveals that they are in fact made of maps themselves, giving an eagle's-eye view, rather than a horizontal perspective.

Tacoma's Toot Reid zooms out into serious abstraction, recreating a visual memory in squares of simple fabric stitched over themselves in a grid, like some pixelated deja vu.

But the biggest map of all is SF Artist Mathew Gerring's 3-D plan of the moon (recently lauded by SFist) which rises in 3-D machine-embroidered splendor. It made us wonder — now that even space is no longer the final frontier, is there any space for wonder anymore?

(First Friday Evenings are free from 5:30-9, or swing by one of the lectures, especially if they're given by BAM's charming curator Stefano Catalani.)