We're afflicted by the ordinary.  As common, superficial, trivial and incomplete as it is, it does its best to act like an all-in-all, constantly hanging about us wherever we try to go, getting lost for a moment but then quickly turning up again, and always attempting to monopolize our attention.

    It can be difficult to perceive the extraordinary.  So unexpected and surprising is it, so much in excess of what we know and so difficult to pin down, that we may fail to register it at all.  Even when we do, we may lack all means of expressing our experience.

    Art that is truly artful takes the ordinary means and objects of the world around us and plays with them, arranges and frames them with such love, taste, skill and grace that something of the transcendent becomes revealed through them.

    Here is the work of artists who've made instruments of themselves to show us hidden truth, strange beauty, the possible beyond the impossible, and other dimensions of existence.