Some of the artists in PAPER use the material to blur the distinctions between different media. In Malia Jensen's sculpture Debark, a bundle tied to a stick is revealed to be an illusion: the cloth is actually made with cast paper, rendering it unable to hold anything, and the six-foot stick is bronze, making it too heavy to carry. Paper is also a tool of subversion for Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, who use it to create "paintings" resembling Abstract Expressionist masterpieces, but with shredded archival paper in an acrylic box. T. Kelly Mason sculpts paper into a mobiles used for the set design of his 2019 sci-fi road movie Space Film. Richard Galpin cuts and excises layers of photographs to create new abstract compositions with painterly effect.

In other instances paper acts as a record of the artist's process. Both Alois Kronschlaeger and François Bucher create cyanotypes and photograms with images burned into the paper by chemical reaction. Kronschlaeger's is made by sewing intricate patterns into mesh laid over paper, while Bucher's is made with accumulated circles of acetate, layered to create a concentric pattern. Tim Youd's works are relics of the artist's performances, in which he retypes entire novels on only two pieces of paper that are taped together and fed through the typewriter over and over until the book is finished. MK Guth's book outlines the artist's instructions for creating a dinner-as-performance art. Francisco Ugarte, an artist who was previously trained as an architect, can also be considered in this group. At first glance, his Self-Portrait looks like a cityscape, but a wide shot of his desk reveals that it is actually an outline of the shadows cast by architectural tools on his work surface. Dread Scott's triptych of photos shows the artist burning a copy of the US Constitution, until a pile of ashes and scraps of paper remain at his feet.