Stand back a bit from Marc Dombrosky’s art, and it disappears. Because the Tacoma artist doesn’t actually draw his own lines – he stitches over other people’s words.

To be precise, Dombrosky picks up writing off the street – ticket stubs, love notes, diary pages – and carefully embroiders over it, transforming the ephemeral into the artistically permanent.

With his first solo museum show now at Portland Art Museum, plus reaching the finals of its 2007 regional competition, Dombrosky is starting to rock the art world the way he does his art – quietly.

“I started in the last year of grad school, studying painting,” says Dombrosky of the path that led him to such a curious art. “I was making rubbings of houses I lived in, then taking a pushpin and marking out the line of the rubbings, so it would show through the other side like a piano roll or Braille or something. I began looking at them as coded language, seeing if there were patterns.”

At the same time, Dombrosky was learning how to embroider from fellow artist Shannon Eakins, who is now his wife. He started stitching through the rubbings, to see how it looked. Meanwhile, he was developing a habit of picking up interesting bits of paper detritus off the street – handwritten notes, business cards and so on. The two ideas came together.

“I stitched one, and it was so different,” he says. “I still don’t know what (the stitching’s) going to look like – richer, different. Each piece is new.”

While invisible from a distance, each piece does, up close, transform the original. Minute stitches mimic the color and flourish of the handwriting, giving it a permanence, elegance and care that jousts with the original, street-dirtied, throwaway intention. Content-wise, the pieces thread together a community: businessmen, people meeting up, friends sending New Year’s cards, even a prostitute’s client list, with hair and eye color and vital body statistics.

After Dombrosky discovered the embroidery technique in 1999 at Ohio State University, he moved to Seattle. He did installation work for Tacoma Art Museum and taught as an adjunct at the Cornish College of the Arts.

With Eakins working in glass and apartments much cheaper, the couple moved to Tacoma, buying an apartment in the Perkins Building downtown in 2004. During the last few years Dombrosky has built a reputation in the Northwest, exhibiting at Seattle galleries and in a Seattle Art Museum group show. He also showed at Tacoma’s Madera and Icebox galleries and around the region.

But last year he made the cut as a finalist for the Portland Art Museum’s inaugural Contemporary Northwest Art awards, and this summer has his first solo museum show as part of the museum’s APEX series of rising Northwest artists. It’s an important career step, but it also gave Dombrosky a chance to sink his teeth into something bigger: panhandling placards.

“COLD HEART HURT HOMELESS VETERAN,” says one placard in all caps. “*NEED TENT* Kid’s Destroyed the One We Had And My PackBack,” laments another. A third, ripped apart, just reads, “Need Bu …”

From the entrance to the APEX gallery, the placards – which Dombrosky found tossed into shrubbery in downtown Seattle – look just like the ones you see held up on street corners, save that they’re enclosed in clear vitrines. But look closely, and you can see the thick black stitching that threads its way across the bent cardboard, literally creating another dimension.

“It’s all about (giving these pieces) a sense of home and comfort, like Grandma’s needlepoint,” says Dombrosky, who had to learn a new set of sewing techniques to deal with the cardboard and plastic.

Jennifer Gately and Marnie Stark, the APEX curators, point out the social aspect: “On the street we tend to avert our eyes,” says Stark, “but here we can gaze on them without the loaded emotion.”

The installation also adds to the play between the signs’ impermanence and the permanent home they’re seeking: The rectangular glass vitrines, as Gately points out, “mimic urban architecture. Marc has a lot to offer conceptually.”

To complement the APEX show, Seattle’s Platform Gallery has several of Dombrosky’s pieces on show in its back project space. They represent another new line of work, centered around celebrity and its obsessions: a denim jacket ostensibly signed by River Phoenix while on shoot in Tacoma, along with the previous owner’s written note about it. (Dombrosky has embroidered over both, the illegible signature taking on the inscrutability of a Chinese character.) There’s a small panhandling placard (“LA or Bust”); an envelope addressed to Molly Ringwald; a student letter about an artwork.

Platform co-founder Blake Haygood is enthusiastic about Dombrosky’s work, though, he admits, most people don’t actually notice the embroidery: “Marc’s work is small. We have to tell them it’s there.”

Meanwhile, the Tacoma artist is quietly and, he admits, obsessively continuing to find bits of paper and stitch them over. He picks up pieces almost daily (“It’s definitely changed the way I walk down the street!”), friends collect them for him.

Nothing, it seems, is immune from the stitching, though he keeps “weird stuff” like Social Security numbers and canceled checks hidden in his archives, and one heart-rending journal written by an evicted woman considering suicide is too painful to do more than one page at a time.

In a small, random way, Dombrosky’s art recreates the local community, or at least a cross-section of it. “The majority of things I pick up speak to a certain demographic. I get a lot of release notes, drug deals. Whose writing gets left is becoming more and more interesting to me.”

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568

What: APEX: Marc Dombrosky

Where: Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave., Portland

When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturdays; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays through Oct. 26

Admission: $10 general, $9 seniors and students, free for 17 and younger

Related event: Artist talk, 2 p.m. Sept. 28

Information: 503-226-2811, www.pam.org

What: “Marc Dombrosky: I Love You to Death”

Where: Platform Gallery, 114 Third Ave. S., Seattle

When: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through July 31

Admission: Free

Information: 206-323-2808, www.platformgallery.com

If you’re in Portland to see Marc Dombrosky’s show, there is plenty of other good art around town, particularly glass shows left over from the June Glass Art Society Conference. Here are three of them.

Portland Art Museum: “Klaus Moje”

The German-born, Australian-emigrated Moje not only transformed the Australian glass art scene, but also integrated Aboriginal palettes and painting techniques into his stunning fused and cold-worked glass, as this 30-year retrospective shows.

Through Sept. 7, 1219 S.W. Park Ave., 1-503-226-2811, www.pam.org

Bullseye Gallery: “Succession”

Covers the work of Australian glass artists Giles Bettison, Claudia Borella, Deb Jones, Jessica Loughlin, Kirstie Rea, and Richard Whiteley, all of whom studied under Klaus Moje (see Portland Art Museum, above) and who source a lot of their glass from Bullseye.

Through Aug. 2, 300 N.W. 13th Ave., 1-503-227-0222, www.bullseyegallery.com

Museum of Contemporary Craft: “Glass: Melissa Dyne”

Melissa Dyne subverts both the notion of craft and the concept of art glass in her installation of an industrial glass window set horizontally atop a false gallery wall.

Through Aug. 10, 724 N.W. Davis St., 1-503-223-2654, www.museumofcontemporarycraft.org