An annual--and this region has three, at Tacoma, Bellevue, and CoCA--is a good idea with a noble intent: Show recent art by local artists, give the public a taste of what's going on among local artists, and work toward an idea of what constitutes Our Art Scene--some unifying concept, some something, no matter how intangible. Trouble is, most annuals succeed in only the first of those three aims, and the result is often a show that's a jumble, a kind of art flea market. Moreover, it can be dispiriting for artists. Those who are accepted have their work hung in a show that isn't necessarily a flattering context; those who are turned away feel judged unworthy, even of a show with no internal coherence.

This year's Bellevue Annual, however, works beautifully. Bellevue Art Museum curator Brian Wallace juried the show himself, and cut the artist roster down to 23, as opposed to last year's laundry list of 100-plus. Many of the artists have more than one work in the show, which Wallace (with the help of his assistant, Miriam Sternberg) has hung in a scrambled fashion--that is, so that Mark Takamichi Miller's three paintings are not placed together, but in various spots around the gallery, next to John Grade in one place and Leo Saul Berk in another. This makes for a show that a viewer can progress through, learning about an artist's work by comparing it to others, gaining a feel for how different kinds of art work together and even against each other.

This simple (though not obvious) choice makes all the difference in the world, especially in a city with a small art scene where most of the artists shown are already quite familiar. You're accustomed to Robert Yoder's work, his quiet and complicated reconfigured street signs; but here, next to Grade's wooden constructions (which seem to contain complex mechanisms that you're not allowed to touch), you realize that both are closed systems: work that is approachable but doesn't give you complete access to its insides, and so remains tantalizingly out of reach. Both Susan Dory and Jeffrey Miller make work about color, but their work tugs in opposite directions. Dory's layered, glazed paintings pull you in and force you to look through the surface, whereas Miller's are so surface-oriented that, in some places, the paint is cracked as if about to peel off. You're pulled by one and pushed by the other, a kind of visual movement that is a rare pleasure.

Such careful curating can also result in unexpected responses. There are video-related works by three women in the Annual. There's Nicola Vruwink's With Love Forever, which documents a week of the artist putting on her face in the morning and cleaning it off at night; Untitled, by Thess Fenner, is a pink dollop of a case that contains a surveillance camera, so that as the viewer leans over the work to examine it more closely, his or her own face appears; finally, Alicia Berger's Parabola is a video installation with projections that show a male dancer frozen in position, until the viewer trips a motion-sensing device, which activates one of the images. Each work is compelling in its own right, but it's also interesting to compare the use of gender roles in the three. Vruwink's work is so girly--using the camera literally as a mirror that examines identity as it is put on and taken off every day. By contrast, Fenner and Berger's high-tech work seems masculine: How the viewer acts on the work determines what the viewer sees. This comparison gives me a critical foothold, to be confirmed or contradicted by other work that crosses my path.

There is so much good work here, one could simply list it all: Cathy McClure's installation People Doing Things, Shiny Objects, Great Color, Occasional Music (a futuristic strobe-lit carousel set in an old-time theater environment); John Jenkins III's blurred peripheral-vision photographs; Berk's smooth wood and resin constructions. As a whole, the show leans toward abstract work, but a very plastic, solid abstraction, and the quality of the work is most evident in the fact that none of it can be boiled down into a high-concept sentence. You have to describe the whole piece even to begin to understand it. So for God's sake, stop reading this article and go.