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SPRING 2019 ISSUE NO. 1: BODY
read more about the cover artist, Julia Wang, on page 9
Dear reader, The mere thought of you holding this magazine in your hand, or pouring over these pages on your computer, is surreal. A little over a year ago, when ASTR* was first conceived, such a moment seemed nearly impossible. How did we get here? The team behind this art magazine is probably not what you’d expect. We’re a team of six, with a dizzying variety of studies, interests, and goals. Only two of us are formally studying an art, while the rest of us are evenly dispersed across STEM and the social sciences. None of us have any prior magazine experience.
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What we came to realize during the winter of our freshman year is that we all share a common frustration: a frustration with the lack of an easy, accessible, and widely circulated outlet for students on campus to express themselves creatively, and a frustration with the lack of appreciation for creativity outside of traditionally artistic majors. It was this frustration that kept us going, that motivated us to take on the creation of a magazine on top of our busy schedules, that pushed us to create something out of nothing.
This is not to discredit our predecessors—the students behind R2, Inferno Gallery, the RWRC Zine, Coffeehouse’s Espresso Yourself and more have done amazing work to uplift student art. What we want to do with ASTR* is expand that definition of art, and create an organization devoted to finding and publishing art from all corners of campus. By not limiting our content to subjective standards of what counts as “art,” and by not limiting our contributors to artists with a certain level of expertise, we hope to inspire everyone in the Rice community to turn inwards and explore their own creative potential. We have no rules, and no desire to pass judgement on things you create. If it speaks to you, it’s good enough for us. Every issue will have a theme, and for our first issue we chose body. Bodies are vulnerable, inseparable from ourselves and who we are as humans, and we think art is the same way. We hope ASTR* will be a place for that human essence to come alive. Love, Gabby, Pilar, Ella, Najah, Izzy and Laura
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collage by isabel samperio
body : a playlist by tim thomas ii 1. I. Pink Toes - Childish Gambino, Jhene Aiko
w 2. Next to Me - Jakob Oga a
3. Last Breath - Ravyn Lenae
4. Fingerprints - Hiatus Kaiyote 5. Young - Frankie Cosmos
6. Blood Type - Cautious Clay 7. Me - OSHUN 8. Hold Me Down - Daniel Caesar
9. Drowsy - Banes World 10. Open Wide - Spencer., Ishmael Raps h e Lung - Hiatus Kaiyote 11. T
12. Human Being - Robyn, Zhala
13. Girl - T h e Internet, KAYTRANADA 14. Close To You - Frank Ocean
15. Drip - T h e Marias, Triathalon 16. CPR - Summer Walk er
17. Brown Steel - Choker
18. Only in My Dreams - T h e Marias
19. Veins - Earl Sweatshirt 20. T h e Ending - Jon Bap
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photograph by Daniel Vadasz
insomnia (or how many words can i rhyme with bed)
1 it’s a little past midnight, i’m lying in my bed trying to fall asleep after you left me on read but i’m distracted by memories of you giving me head and haunted by all the things we left unsaid
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2 the texts i never sent you, the texts you never read the on the phone silences, the things i never said the iloveyous, imissyous, the times i almost begged for you to tell me that you loved me, for the silence to end
3 are you thinking of times we made love on your bed? of grilled cheese sandwiches on sourdough bread of the way you had me tied around your finger like a thread or are you thinking of the last girl you kissed instead?
4 when i cry myself to sleep at night, the tears stain my bed when i think about you too hard, it really hurts my head i’m so scared of the future, i hate thinking ahead because a future without you is a future that i dread
photos and words by ella feldman
5 it’s a little past three, i’m lying in my bed trying to fall asleep in the puddle that i’ve shed i hate the way i left you, i wish i’d stayed instead sin ti tengo hambre, sin ti tengo sed
For Julia Esteban Wang, art is a reflection of how she sees the world. “My portfolio as a whole is pretty varied in terms of techniques and mediums, but I think there’s an overarching theme,” she said. “What is the world? What do I see in it? What do I want to say about it?”
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The cover image, titled “Capital Crush,” is a piece Wang created for Beginning Drawing with Christopher Sperandio. For the assignment, students had to make a collage, then draw it onto paper using just three colors. Wang made her drawing using only red, yellow and blue colored pencils.
“I started thinking about how things that we do impact the people elsewhere in general,” Wang said of her original collage, which drew on images from The Economist and related magazines. “I thought about how history has propped up this ideal of the rich and wealthy, while kind of ignoring the consequences.” Wang is a senior at Baker College originally from San Jose, California, and she’ll be graduating soon with degrees in Economics and Art History. Although she plans to pursue a career in international law and development, she doesn’t see art ever ceasing to be a part of her life. “I think [my career] will give me a lot of reflections and observations about the world in general, and I think that will really help me in my creative life,” she said, “because they’re very much one thing to me.”
Capital Crush, color pencil
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In Medias Res a mouth pressed into a sound for something hardly remembered: light through a valley underbelly of the fog and the feeling of someone, or a city where it rains and rains. for you there is a valley somewhere else, and another flood— but they are not the same, or even like the same. we stay up all night remembering. / I find there is a giving in the way a body returns to a starting point and then drives forward forever. a giving, as when morning comes you fall asleep, curled into the couch; a mouth pressed into an armrest, a hand—your hands—always over the edge and under the soft light, a blinded window in a city where it rains and rains and rains.
poem by Ana Paula Pinto-Diaz photograph by J Peterson
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Drawing by Andrea Rubero
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photograph by Lia Martin
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Painting, Writing, and Sculptures by Nicky Meaux
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Miasma
Artist Statement Miasma was created as an attempt to characterize the novel, contaminated biosystem created by the disruption of the San Jacinto River by the release of industrial waste containing known toxins. Through its graphic depiction of the potential physiological impact on resident humans, Miasma incorporates a cross section of the beings affected by this change as well as the culpable toxin itself. Though the social and environmental dynamics of this pollution cascade are well-documented in Houston media and EPA and FDA documentation, its surrounding discourse is relatively inaccessible to those most affected. By exhibiting this piece in a local (free) gallery, I hope that Miasma is able to bridge this gap: through viewers’ exposure to the piece itself, they are able to gain knowledge on the their own exposure to the enclosed chemicals in their day-to-day lives. The process of creating Miasma, producing a cadaverous cast of my own face only to hollow it out and imbue it with
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living, stinking, and dangerous materials was a distinctly unique, fraught experience. Excavating chunks of my cheeks, chin, and forehead, I embedded resin boils as if looking in a mirror before piercing them with a syringe of algae, amoebas, and dioxin. My face transformed in an artificial acceleration of the process many Houston residents may be going through over the course of months. With time, the encapsulated water may leech into the integral material of the sculpture, and my face will crumble: a sobering, discomfiting assertion that this change is both irreversible and catastrophic. As this decay progresses, Miasma will grow in similarity to its companion piece. Myco, asserting the progression of decomposure and regrowth (and eventual global fungal takeover), is a much truer death mask than Miasma with its cross section of a biosystem. The two do not act in sequence, or dichotomously, but as two alternate and mutually exclusive forms of existence dependent on systems of living and non-living beings.
Myco
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charcoal drawing by Tejas Kumar
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Miranda Morris
Gillian Culkin
c o l l a g e s
o r i g i n a l
b y
p h o t o
a n a p a u l a
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p i n t o
b y d a v i d r a t n o f f
Death Mask by Anna Fritz
photo by Kira Chen
pho to g ra
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hs by
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hilli
ard
su
ni
e
it
no
fr u i t
ula Ana Pa
Pinto
-Diaz
Fruit Woman is a multimedia piece incorporating 3-channel video, 5.1 surround sound, and sculpture into a live performance. The Fruit Woman, portrayed by an actor wearing a body-modifying sculpture of silicone rubber and real fruit, performs a fertility ritual. Throughout the ritual, three screens behind the actor project a series of nonlinear events, both real and hallucinatory, surrounding the Fruit Woman’s imaginary pregnancy. Sound blurs the divide between real and imagined by scoring events both live and recorded. In my first iteration of Fruit Woman, I wore the piece with ruby grapefruits instead of pomegranates in the breasts, one of which I would slice away and eat with a spoon. The piece felt then like a feminist statement, as body parts associated with fertility and made for others’ consumption became objects, instead, of self-consumption. But as the kind of person who has always imagined my future self a mother, Fruit Woman evolved during this time into a kind of mourning ritual. The realization that this motherhood thing – a thing I had always taken as a given – may not, in fact, come to be was associated for me with a great deal of sadness, and so Fruit Woman became an extension of that. She was an expression of my past hopes for the future and present mourning of my past and future.
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Pauline Huff
3 minute nude study in charcoal
photograph by David Ratnoff
l
ysis of the Ros e a s Se
Ana
ntimental Despair
I think Twombly makes your body a stranger. you become her: the rose that unravels the wound of solitude that remains unspeakable and what I imagine heartache must look like on a tightly-pulled canvas. a number of strangers enter under a condition of stillness. of silence. no one speaks but wanders, looks. you and I for the love of it: we walk like mystics in a trance, or spin like dervishes in silence— every sound will stop if you let it. really I admit my knowledge of your body is only this: the sense of a figure in a midtown gallery skylight fragments pooling softly on the side of your face. and each time it is like this: the rose bleeds out we do not touch light, as we conjure it begins to settle and every aspect of this body gives in to it.
poem by An
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a Paula Pin
to
photo by Sabrin
a Bisaga
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photographs by Shucheng Yan front and David Ratnoff back
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bodypaint
claudia middleton
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drawing by Andrea Rubero
Pinto-Diaz Ana Paula 45
boy us artist
anonymo
Emma
Brown
n
g
charcoal drawin
Tejas Kumar
The Bushwish Collective 29 St. Nicholas Ave Brooklyn, NY 11237
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Street Art by Dasic Fernandez Photography by Laura Yordan
a is
draw i
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photo by david ratnoff
n is for nose
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astr*editorial team astr*editorial team astr*editorial team
architecture
political science, min or in business visual and dramatic
al health
inor in glob
gy, m psycholo
arts
civil and environmental eng ineering
social polic
y analysis
astr*editorial team astr*editorial team astr*editorial team
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con 55
utors b i sabrina bisaga emma brown kira chen gillian culkin anna fritz nonie hilliard pauline huff tejas kumar lia martin nicky meaux claudia middleton miranda morris j peterson ana paula pinto-diaz david ratnoff andrea rubero tim thomas ii daniel vadasz varsha veeramachaneni grace wilson shucheng yan alina zhu
join the team! email rice. a s t r @ gmail.com h t t p s : / / www.instagram.com/ astr.mag/ https://astrmag.tumb l r . c o m /
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