MIRROR

Look too long and you’ll fall perilously in love with yourself, break one and you’ll be walking off seven years bad luck, break one while walking under a ladder in front of a black cat, well, we don’t want to go there. You might call it Miroir in Paris, Specchio in Rome, Espejo in Madrid or South America, Lustro in Poland, Jing in China or Oglinda on the Romanian mountain side, regardless of how you spell it, speak it or look into one, mirrors have a long reflective history with civilization and a shimmering history with science.

Of the many types of mirrors and the various applications they serve, to our knowledge a type doesn’t exist that will return youth, replace hair loss or shed those extra ten pounds from last holiday season. There are applications that let us look deep into space, like the 10.4 meter Gran Telescopio Canarias atop a dormant volcano in Spain, the largest telescope mirror in the world or the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat at 10,582 km² located in the Potosi and Oruro region of southwest Bolivia. When covered with a thin layer of water those 4,000 square miles make an awful big mirror, used by satellites to gage and test instrumentation.

Mirrors and the word mirror peer far into our human experience, as in, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical research of “The Mirror Stage,” “Le Stade du Miroir,” the stage at which a child recognizes themselves in a mirror, or Star Trek’s mirror universe concept, Euclidean Plane Isometry, a study of image manipulation by mirrors, The Hubble Telescope, or mirror neurons in the inferior frontal lobe of humans responsible for language development. Mirrors play a huge role in our everyday lives, not to mention simple political smoke and mirrors!

From forgotten writing methods like Boustrophedon, a morphing of Arabic style and English style, where the writer would scribe from left to right one line and then begin the next line and write from right to left, a very efficient method of writing from the sounds of it, to cutting ones own hair, to a Kaleidoscope, reflections, the beauty and perspective they bring sure do add some color to life.

Wherever and however they’re found, a polished specularly reflective glass substrate cover on one side with silver and tin, activated by a chemical component, covered by copper and painted for protection will produce quite an image. What that image represents is entirely up to you!