The Figge Art Museum's Contemporary Glass Invitational feels dangerous. The glass process itself carries the physical peril of fire and molten liquid. The artistic effects are also unsettling, combining soothing beauty with surprise. These glass sculptures glow with intense and subtle visual pleasures, but they also create anxiety through their tensions and contradictions.

Creepy bunny costumes rendered in charcoal on paper, elongated hands rising out of the water to scratch at the stormy sky, a long, unspooled, film-like reel of hands signing out a missive wrapped around toppled driftwood pillars, and a possible gate to the underworld are parts of two separate book-based bodies of work now at Quad City Arts. One set re-presents the familiar with superb technical eloquence, utilizing the book as an end-product receptacle. The other, more adventurous body of work requires the book to become a component of the viewer's experience of the show.

For our fall 2007 photo contest, we asked our readers to submit photographs playing off the words "beginning," "middle," and "end." Here we present our favorites from among the nearly 100 submissions we received.

A luminescent circle gleams over an ocean of subtle fabric waves. Little squares of small purple beads sit like boats on a pale-blue sea. Surprising fragments of red and white texture enter from the side. A cloaked green figure seems to walk along the shore to a blue-misted house in the distance. Behind in the sky, cloud forms repeat the patterns on the surface of the water. Little gold amulets shine in the light. One can feel the coolness in the air and the breeze rising up from the water.