Mosaic Tiles
I took the bus to the gallery today. On Mission Street we passed a building that was adorned with mosaic tiles - the blues and reds caught my attention. It got me wandering about all the times I had taken that bus route, all the times I looked out the window and never noticed those mosaic tiles.
I always sit in the same seat - the window seat that faces the rear of the bus. I sit in this seat time and again because it's part of my routine. I sit in the rear-facing seat because the views from the window are much preferable. What I mean exactly is that when looking out the window, the frame rolls in reverse, backwards, allowing an extended glimpse at the passing scenes.
What also got me thinking was the amount of art I pass on a daily basis without noticing. I pass a lot of art that I do notice, and I have seemingly passed a lot of art that I haven’t. There is so much art hidden within the forty-nine square miles of San Francisco, but these four feet of sporadically-positioned mosaics on the front of what might’ve been an apartment complex clouded my mind the same way the fog rolls over the Golden Gate and engulfs the city.
The concept of taking something broken and piecing it back together, reincarnating it into something even more spectacular than its preceding life, intrigues me. About a week ago, perhaps less, I was thinking about creating mosaics myself. Probably abstract ones, of course. Needless to say, I find it the slightest bit peculiar that I am thinking so much about these small, easily-passable mosaics on the side of that apartment building.
I like the idea of revitalizing a broken entity or vessel, reimagining it as something its original creator never envisioned. To create something so lovely and captivating out of something so broken and otherwise useless. To see beauty in a fractured object is a rare gift in this contemporary world. To breathe life into something that was drained of it and to recognize its potential, that is a most beautiful quality.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say. Does this mean I am broken, too? Why did these mosaic tiles captivate me so? I think in my own way, I am those mosaic tiles - shattered and rebirthed into something more.