Maya, maya, maya

On Friday night I was out on State Street with EK, my friend Jingle from Lawrence Uni, and some of her friends. We passed the new Madison Museum of Modern Art in the Overture Center; even just the museum shop's window display was so fantastic that I had to go back later by myself to gaze at the glass forms.

It struck me that the reason glass is so fascinating is that unlike other manmade objects, including other art media, it doesn't simply absorb and reflect light from its surface. It takes the light into itself, bends it, and throws it back out re-shaped. In this way, glass is like the vertebrate eye, which also doesn't simply pass light on to the brain but re-shapes it, taking the virtual image that falls on the cornea and reconstituting it as a real image on the retina. To look at glass is to gaze into another eye - inanimate, but seeing.

I had to look up the Wikipedia entry on lenses to recall the English terms; on Friday night I could only remember the words as I had learned them in Malay, imej nyata and imej maya, the "clear" or "obvious" image, and the "illusory" "delusional" image. Maya is a word from before the time of Islam, when Southeast Asia was Buddhist and Hindu. It's a Sanskrit word referring to the unreality of the world as we see it. (It's also, for obvious reasons, the name of a professional 3D graphics software.) According to my Fajar Bakti dictionary, alam maya, the "illusory world", is a synonym for alam semesta, the "whole world".

A good lens reconstitutes without distortion an image from the light that falls on it; a piece of art glass may also throw back what it sees, but also creates images within itself of things that do not exist. In this way, glass is truly maya.

Then yesterday when I was grocery shopping there was a flier out for UW's Glass Lab Open House...how could I not go?

I made it there an hour before they closed this afternoon, just in time to catch the beginning of a plate-making demonstration (pictures later). I'd be scared to work with glass. The sense of rhythm and timing, and learning to handle and use the properties of the material is appealing, but the prospect of having your work gone in an instant with one false step is frightening.

I ended up buying two glasses ($27 total) from the students' sale.

They were made by the same person. The first one is a lovely exercise in minimalism. Just plain colourless glass with a small square of simulated fish scales:

The second I don't like quite as much, but I got it to match the first:

Yay, I bought art - exciting! I've become more comfortable with the concept of buying art since being around Jodi and Laura on last year's Philippines trip. It seems less like something "rich people" do and more like something I would do just to have a small piece of beauty. Either that, or I'm becoming "rich people". =P