Table of Contents 3 4 5 6 8 10 11 12 13 14 15 17 19 20 24 25 26
Dawn, Sydney Lo Au (I), Priya Chohan Thistle, Sabrina Saeed Looking out the Window, Sam Oaks-Leaf Storm, Priya Chohan Growth from Frills of Fungus, Rebecca Ho Infolding/Outfolding, Priya Chohan The Sound, Deanna Moorehead soundwaves, Yereem Chun The Real Blueno, Jena Lee Stillness, Ella Rosenblatt Moon Jar Series No. 2, Rebecca Ho Moli: A Subtle Takeover, Tia Forsman Fish in a Tank, Sophia Zheng Selective Anatomy, Ariel Silverman Echolocation, Alexandra Pourvali Little Infinities, Henry Dawson
29 30 32 35 36 37 39 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 49 50 51 52
Light Microscopy Imaging Exploration of A Human Knee Joint, Ariel Silverman Analysis of Retrieval, Micaela Camacho-Tenreiro Neurons Collage, Annie Ge Vascular, Sabrina Saeed Limbo, Tiffany Lin Endless Underneath 1 and 2, Tia Forsman Organic, Deanna Moorehead Nature Scene, Alexandra Pourvali Mortal Layers, Yereem Chun Independent Research, Sydney Lo Perishable Matter, Yereem Chun Early Bloomer, Yereem Chun Serum, Yereem Chun Whose Phenomena?, E.L. Meszaros Nurwara, Priya Chohan 猴ĺ?, Priya Chohan Untitled (cellular pattern), Ceyhun Firat tapestry / constellation, JD Calvelli
53 55 57 59 61 62
Untitled (neural pattern), Ceyhun Firat Fusion, Priya Chohan Strontium, Priya Chohan Lithium, Priya Chohan Precession, Liam Carpenter-Urquhart Silent Invasion, Eileen Holland
Co-Editors in Chief Tiffany Lin Elena Renken Kaitlin Sandmann Staff Writers Micaela Camacho-Tenreiro Liam Carpenter-Urquhart Henry Dawson Tiffany Lin E.L. Meszaros Deanna Moorehead Malika Ramani Sophia Zheng
1
Writing Editors Micaela Camacho-Tenreiro Liam Carpenter-Urquhart Stephanie Carrero Priya Chohan Rakia Islam Richard Li Tiffany Lin Kristen McLean Elena Renken Kaitlin Sandmann Moe Sattar Leticia Wood Sophia Zheng
Design Head Tanaya Puranik Design Editors Muskaan Garg Richard Li Deanna Moorehead Alexandra Pourvali Elena Renken Staff Artists Yereem Chun Ceyhun Firat Deanna Moorehead Alexandra Pourvali Cover Art by Ariel Silverman Light Microscopy Imaging of Human Hyaline Cartilage taken on a Zeiss Axiovert 200M Fluorescence Microscope Web Editors Priya Chohan Rakia Islam Deanna Moorehead Kitty Ng
From the Editors
Dear gentle collections of atoms,
In this issue, we contemplate the arc of growth and aging. Through brushstrokes and pixels, we observe changes microscopic and macroscopic, biological and environmental, quick and slow. Within this journal you’ll find genesis, unfolding, transformation, and resolution represented through shifts in color and language and form. You’ll sit with portraits illustrating medical history and watch researchers nurturing cells as they mature. You’ll stargaze and immerse yourself in water. You’ll delve into methods of thinking across languages and follow the motion of sound waves toward the skull. Creative acts require time and patience to urge something new into the world. This is true in both the sciences and the arts—the process of testing new hypotheses resembles the process of drafting stories. As you consider the works in this issue, we encourage you to contemplate the temporality of their creation, from the articulation of intricate scientific theories to the deliberate pencil strokes that construct drawings. Consideration of time helps us to see the humanity of achievements in research and production. It reveals the hands of artists and scientists at work as they shape and craft, rendering their projects more approachable while honoring their labor. In this journal, we consider time as a constitutive aspect of work that spans disciplines; this reflexivity illuminates the methodology of art and the creativity of science. We aim to link these fields through experiential overlap and draw out new intersections between disciplines that remain divided in the world around us. The artists and writers here have taken time and transformed it. We hope that the time you may spend with this journal brings you something meaningful as well. Love, Elena, Kaitlin, and Tiffany
1
Dawn Sydney Lo
Waves seep through agate halves, fingertips slipping on their rings as though the sun rose too late over the sea and in it even the dark is heavy. I scavenge through pebbles, half-waiting, hold my knees to my chest and ask questions the way people put messages in bottles, decipher uneven splits in the damp rock. Somewhere I have been here forever, growing lichen on the inside of my palms, with my bones born so many times over I do not think they are alive. I find a broken watch on the shore, seconds in concentric circles, and a curled fist can hold them if it too is like water and will soften broken glass. 2
3
Au (I)
Priya Chohan
Thistle
3
4
Sabrina Saeed 7” x 10.5”
5
Looking Out the Window Sam Oaks-Leaf
In my grandpa’s house in the Berkshires I could see the stars Through an octagonal window high on the wall above the couch where I slept. Occasionally the window would align with the moon. That is when I wished That the moon was an octagon. At two in the morning I heard a whooping cough outside. I went out to find it. My sister was standing by the pond, regaining her breath. Her sound waves glided over the pond Gilded by the moonlight Cutting neatly Through the music of the crickets and the leaves.
6
The cold air calms her lungs I know So I suggest we sleep on the hammock. I hear her wheezes softening infinitesimally As ripples soften after a splash. Disturbances disappearing subtly, But not entirely, into space. I looked at the moon as I listened My view unrestricted, My toes just at the tip of the tree line. Lightly bathed by the breeze I am serenaded in my sister’s waves. We swayed that night on the hammock Like a pendulum swings, Like a spring oscillates. When the old hammock’s ropes snapped in the night, we fell Like Galileo’s stones from the Tower of Pisa, Like Halley’s comet towards the sun.
7
Stephen Hawking once noted that a complete theory of the universe might dictate That we should never know the theory ourselves. In that case, our wonder would have no use at all. But its use is clear to me. To create new questions and keep us breathing calmly Like a body laying next to you on cool grass Beneath broken strings. It is in our nature then, To tilt our head back onto the grass And look again through the strings To the moon. “Humanity’s deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for continuing our quest.” -Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Storm
Priya Chohan 8
9
Growth from Frills of Fungus
Rebecca Ho, 7” x 8” x 10” white and red stoneware, cone 06 oxidation
Infolding/Outfolding
10 2
36
Tia Forsman, 36” x 36” oil on un-stretched canvas
11
The Sound Deanna Moorehead
In the early morning the streets are silent, missing the thrum of chasing cars and hums of background chatter. Absence makes all that is left louder. A single sparrow’s warbled tune The wind whooshing overhead Footfalls flapping on ragged pavement, saccharine scrape of denim, and the raspy huffs of my breath Rhythm, my body’s rushing hour It punctures the cold, the sound. This is how the silence sings: before the static numbs our pulses all away
soundwaves 12
Yereem Chun
soundwaves Yereem Chun
13 19
The Real Blueno
Jena Lee 1735 x 1965 px Photoshop
Stillness Ella Rosenblatt
Stillness. a crochet hook darting through the right hole, adeptly snagging the yarn, pulling through, gymnastics over and through, hooking thread again and sliding through the two hoops you created. a smooth finish, a thousand times over—it ends in increments but could go on to infinity; endings and beginnings are only ever partial, always layered, always enveloped. I hold your hand now as if it were precious and rare, but I can’t know how I’ll feel ten years ahead, a thousand stitches, scarves ahead. I can only know this skin on skin feels smooth like the softest coat of a lamb, like the warmest winter stew. Stillness.
20 14
15
Smoke rises into the air and escapes my mouth and meets the other mist and I wonder if it’s adversarial. Surely it’s hot and cold but everything dissipates in gas, gases, vapors, in that way they are the most peaceful state. They mold and crowd to any space without complaint. Stillness. eyes closed doesn’t stop the seeing, is no absence of sight. Stillness. There’s a “you” that exists in my mind in a platonic sense, removed from an embodied person, a real personality. my most intimate confidant and yet I don’t even know their name. This you is the best embrace I can imagine and the warmest smile. This you is superlative in every sense, to all my senses. The sweetest, purest taste, the most lovely sight. This you is a hedonist’s fever dream, the pure dissipation, osmosis of pleasure. This you is only for me is mine is possessed. I’m possessed. Stillness: a lack of change or a constant? monotony or stagnation. They’re different; I know that. I just wonder if I would rather be a dead mirror lake; or water tapping stones on my way downhill, falling forever, onwards, forward, down.a world sculpted in obeisance to their hunger. Sugars from the honey stretch and open, mingling with the memories of the grains, now broken down into the unfurled chains of starch by the clockwise toil of those tan cracked hands.
Moon Jar Series No. 2
Rebecca Ho 19” x 14” x 14” and 26” x 12” x 12” white stoneware, cone 10 reduction
16
untitled
Rebecca Ho
25 17
Artist statement: I am deeply interested in the history and anthropology of medicine. Many of my paintings draw directly from the knowledge and imagery I have gathered from a medical education, while my whole creative practice is rooted in my interactions with patients in art therapy and a strong belief in art as a tool for healing. Through multi-media painting, I equate the complex beauty of the body with the beauty of creative expression. My works illuminate moments of opaque bodily processes that are often confusing and disorienting, acknowledging that visual imagery—not words—can grant us a more comforting understanding of our bodies. Materials, including thinned down paint, sand, ink and fabric, drive this exploration and illumination. The works ultimately become meeting places for my material interests to intersect with my infatuation with minuscule biological processes and their meanings. By painting, layering, cutting, and staining the canvas, I dissect, abstract, and complicate pathological moments that science would view as purely black or white.
Moli: A Subtle Takeover
18
oil on canvas on embroidery hoop, 20” x 20” Tia Forsman
19
Fish in a Tank Sophia Zheng
The way goldfish mouths contort when they eat, G observes, mimics her own circular, puckered lips stretching and compressing. Compressing, then stretching. The food in their mouths, like in hers, is broken down mechanically, chemically, and willingly because that’s the way it is when digestion is the next stage of the life cycle. Caterpillars become butterflies. Tadpoles become toads. Fish eggs become fish. Chewing her own breakfast of milk and toast topped with a slice of ham, G can’t help thinking, this is meant to be. The goldfish, nibbling on fish food, know it too. They know. They knew. They will know. They won’t. The goldfish belong to her neighbor Lu, who loves her fish and the way they drift into the background of a space with water and gravel to create a moving picture. A film, that’s what she means. “It’s visual ambiance!” Lu exclaimed. Once, G remarked: “Fish are boring pets.” 20
“That’s not true.” Lu believed her goldfish were affectionate and intelligent. “See—if you kiss the glass, they’ll kiss you back!”, and she smacked her lips against the fish tank, expecting the goldfish to respond like a trained cat or dog. That’s not true. “Let’s face it,” G says aloud. “Fish are stupid.” And lazy too. These days, when the temperature is high and everything smaller seems to move faster but everything larger cannot, G’s limbs carry her slowly from the dining table to the sofa, where she sinks into the coolness of the leather couch. Summer is a precious time, and there are things G wants to do she hasn’t thought of yet; there are also things she doesn’t want to do, and caring for fish is one of them. Goldfish are more like plants, G reasoned, and even some plants require more care. Like orchids. It was only after Lu offered to pay her a few hundred dollars, G decided maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. “My goldfish are sensitive creatures,” Lu instructed. “They require affection and looking after.” She motioned towards G to stand where she stood in front of the fish tank. “Keep your eyes forward, and just watch.” She pulled a chair over. “Take a seat, when you’re tired.” 21
G stared at the fish, the way Lu did, and thought, this isn’t anything. It’s nothing. It’s boring. It’s a waste. Wasting time. Wasting away. There’s almost nothing there, and soon there’ll be nothing left, but fish in a fish tank swimming the days away. That’s right. The goldfish never stopped swimming. Their fins just shifted gears and shifted speeds, boring through the water like worms—as if that’s what they’ve become. G didn’t think they slept, but they probably did. With their eyes open, unblinking, and still swimming. She swam too. In the open sea, paddling away from shore, beneath the sun, skin tingling from the heat and the coolness of water lapping against her body. There was salt in her mouth. It tasted sweet. Like pickles and whatnot. Then her limbs filled with acid, and ached; her body stilled. Limp atop the waves, with clouds floating across the sky, she waited to be swept to shore. The sand was sticky, and the sea breeze blew through her pores and her mouth and her nose. Her recollection reminds G of goldfish gills and the way they open and close. We all need oxygen to survive, she thought, but I’d drown in water and they’d drown on land. Once, when cleaning the fish tank, she dropped a goldfish into the sink and it flip-flopped around like oil on a skillet. Whether it was gasping for air, or gasping for water, she wasn’t quite sure. G breathed in. Up above, clouds kept passing by, moving from mountains and trees and cities, and towards mountains again. 22
There was something admirable about their endless energy G wishes she had, even for a moment. How fish kept moving forward, but not in any particular direction; traveling along circular paths, oval paths, and rectangular ones. Towards something, maybe, but never past, and then they turn away because of the glass—it’s right there. It’s not there. It’s invisible. It’s transparent. Like windows, and she thinks, if the windows were open, and if fish breathed air just as well as water, the wind could lift the goldfish from their little water tank and into the clouds, where they’d be swimming around the world, mindless as they are. But G prefers to keep the windows closed. Like her eyes that are drowsy from the heat and don’t want to look around anymore. Her body relaxes, descending deeper into the sofa cushions. She doesn’t want to move much; instead, her thoughts do, skirting around the room, around her sweating body, and between this and that before lingering on the edge of a fish eye, and staring into a black hole. Those black holes, she decides, are draining.
23
Selective Anatomy colored pencil and pastel on paper 14” x 14” Ariel Silverman 24
Echolocation
graphite and digital editing, 7.5” x 11” Alexandra Pourvali
25
Little Infinities Henry Dawson
Take a look with the naked eye and you see red: a pure, thin liquid, with a slight sheen to it. Drop in, further, and you’ll see the way hints of light shatter and bend through, twisted by the clear crib of the plastic well plate and the countless infinitesimal molecules drifting by, organic stars in a rubied media sky. What sleeps here can grow to build a heart; pieces we feed and nourish, cell by cell. Out of that small red pond, no bigger than a cherry, are the ingredients to save a life. Now twist the focus and drop in further, to the base, a singular layer thinner than a hair. Atop this bed of gel, thousands of unborn infinities tremble. Stem cells. Each one becoming everything that is us. Each one is a puzzle that thousands of scientists, keen as razors and thorough as machines, devote their lives to. Some, once shepherded and nurtured, can grace a body with the strength to stand and walk for the first time in years, arch its back and stretch to the sky. Others can grow into a balm to heal malunioned bones back into one true whole.
8
26
The ones I held in warm, gloved hands can one day throb and beat and set blood flowing in the heart of a newborn child. If the lab goes well, what I hold in my palm will throb and strum just like that. If we are utterly clean, working like smooth clockwork within the laminar flow of the sterile hood. If the thousands of molecules bump in orbit and crash down from that reddened sky above in the correct and just fashion. If the cells hold true, and the work of the thousands that came before is steady and robust, if the cells are saved from the hungry tendrils of mold and fungus, if our path is well lit and we walk it true, we can hold a little infinity in the palm of our hands. Here there is everything at stake; hearts and lungs and bones and nerves and the possibility to repair and build everything within us. What we can do is endless, like the lights of all the stars in the sky. We have the tools, that vast, slow, inexorably churning machine of science. The faith of those who work within it. Because even though we are dealing with the realm of the gods, we can break through the sheer, unknown, darkness of the sky. Everything is there to take hold of; we must yearn and stretch and reach until it is ours.
27
3
Analysis of Retrieval Micaela Camacho-Tenreiro
Light Microscopy Imaging Exploration of a Human Knee Joint
Ariel Silverman taken on a Zeiss Axiovert 200M Fluorescence Microscope 29
After Robert Schrauf
TEN SPANISH-ENGLISH SPEAKING BILINGUALS WERE CUED WITH WORDS IN SPANISH AND ENGLISH IN BLOCKED CONDITIONS ON SEPARATE DAYS AND ASKED TO “THINK ALOUD” WHILE SEARCHING FOR AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INCIDENT RELATED TO THE CUE WORD:*
And so they walked into themselves to look for las palabras//a tientas//their memory, a house of mirrors only lit by the moon and tonight, she is only//crescent//creciente//on the verge of// crescendo//but still spilling in so small through the windows. They move between languages with the tristeza of a dedicated swimmer//the tragedy of being unable to breathe underwater// of always having to come up for English//my chest is a clenched fist and we are so tired of g//r//asping//of arms, heavy and 30
outstretched and how hesitantly they weave through their own darkness there//inquietos, as if by the possibility of caída//of a cave-in//of this casa//crumbling//en el viento of their voices// crumbling//as if this casa had ever been anything more than col//lapse in the first place//crumbling//as if they were not being asked to talk through the debris of dos idiomas//and do you think they’re ever devastated by how much of themselves has already turned to dust? Imagínense los momentos en que esperaban encontrar las palabras y solamente alcanzaron sus espumas, sus fantasmas. Their own open mouths, in the crackle of the glass. How not even the moonlight would land on their tongues, even as it ricocheted off the walls and clattered to the ground like a marble//falling//through the gaps in the floorboards//sinking//the gravity of grammar//and esta no//che interminable. Hubo un tiempo en el que no existía en inglés, en el que solamente sabía respirar en español. I am always longing for that which my lungs have lost the capacity to//hold//reaching//for what I can never remember. *Schrauf, Robert W. “A protocol analysis of retrieval in bilingual autobiographical memory.” The International Journal of Bilingualism , vol. 7, no. 3, 2003, pp. 235-256. 31
10
32
Neurons Collage
mixed media, 78 x 100 cm Annie Ge At the intersection of Art and Neuroscience, I aim to explore the complexity of our brain and nervous system through distinct, artistic perspectives. Presenting a more visualized art form, the discovery of neuroscience and ourselves can be more accessible to all.
33
5
34
Limbo
Tiffany Lin
There are spaces in the world that appear liminal, like the endlessness of subway platforms in open air as the train passes on, the station in endless recession like hairlines, with age, or waves under a full moon. The struggle of fitting arms through sweater holes, tightening and tangling in Celtic knots. The morbidity of dreams with faces that look strange and feel familiar in the moment you awaken and ask, do I know them? Peering through the slates of high train tracks to see people through windows that let light in from above. Seeking the lost hours from eight to ten that passed in a shuttered blink. Wishing the moon would stop following you home.
Vascular
11� x 14� pencil drawing Sabrina Saeed
35
11
36
Endless Underneath 1 37 12
6” x 6” Sand, india ink, and glass beads on canvas board Tia Forsman
Endless Underneath 2
20
6” x 6” Sand, india ink, and glass beads on canvas board Tia Forsman
38
Organic
Deanna Moorehead 21
40
Nature Scene
9� x 12� graphite and digital editing Alexandra Pourvali 41
Mortal Layers Yereem Chun
42
Independent Research Sydney Lo
When I am sure that the skin is numb I make the incision two inches above my left knee in an uneven line, make the edges, open up the limb to spill out yellow adipose and subcutaneous tissue, which are, in a sense, sterile personhood, but only in their resemblance to the epidermal diagrams in anatomy textbooks that promise some explanation for why the body continues to live. The cut does not reach bone, and my fingertips begin to slip on blood and scalpel, so instead I watch the femoral vein beneath striations of muscle fibers, untouched, soundless, and I wonder if this is what the first medical students saw in the morgue, splitting open cadavers, static flesh until it is no longer flesh, a label, a symptom, diagnosis, and I wonder how it all works out.
43
Perishable Matter 猴ĺ?
Priya Chohan
Yereem Chun
44
Early Bloomer Yereem Chun 16
Serum
Yereem Chun
46
Whose Phenomena? E.L. Meszaros
The Mesopotamians were some of the first to not just look up at the night sky, but also to write down what they saw. It seems as though it should have been their prerogative to name the night sky. Yet little of their language remains to us. We call the the scales “libra,” but we do it in Latin instead of Akkadian. They wrote it MULZI.BA.AN.NA in Sumerian, zibānītu in Akkadian, in cuneiform—any of these names would serve the constellation fine. The Mesopotamian names we do use weren’t named in antiquity, but rather are modern conventions. “Enkidu” and “Gilgamesh” are names of craters on Ganymede, sure, but they weren’t named by the ancient culture that created these characters. The planets, which were noted and observed by the Mesopotamians, are named after the Greek word πλανήτης (planetes), or “wanderer.” Unlike the constellations, unlike the scales or libra or zibānītu or MULZI.BA.AN.NA, which rotate in strict relation to each other, the planets seemed to wander through these stars. The Greeks established geometric models to predict when these wanderers would reappear and to explain their relationship to us, to Earth. 47
Each individual planet, though, is named for a Roman god. “Jupiter” is a Latin name for a Greek planet that was first noted by other cultures centuries earlier. Just as the Romans named this wandering star after the the principle god of their pantheon, the Mesopotamians associated it with their god Marduk. Why is the planet named after one god and not the other, when neither is familiar to the human of today? Really all of this naming business is bullshit, anyway. Names change, cultures evolve— whatever language we use to assign names to aspects of the universe tells us more about the power dynamics of the cultures that astronomical knowledge moved through. The labels for constellations and planets, the moving and stationary stars named for Greek and Roman ideas, describe not the engagement of these cultures with the sky but rather their imperialist legacy. They saw the planets, too, in Babylon. In Assur they noted the movements of the sky. In Nineveh they predicted the rising of the moon and the occultation of the sun. We don’t use their names, though. They’re far away, in time and distance and ideology.
48
Nurwara
猴子
Priya Chohan
20 49
Priya Chohan 8
50
tapestry / constellation JD Calvelli
love is elastic, it springs back and forth undulating to the beat of our collective cosmic heart, but love can only take so much wear before it buckles under the weight of unfulfilled promises and unfinished even the toughest fiber, spiders silk, is still susceptible to ravenous time and, like a tapestry
51
Untitled (cellular pattern) Ceyhun Firat
you spend weeksmonthsyears searching for the finest fabrics
to spend weeksmonthsyears weaving together intricate patterns of pictures, letters words, thoughts, memories to spend weeksmonthsyears meticulously mending the fraying corners in vain for you know as well as i that over the weeks the months the years the work will be carefully, inevitably eaten away by moths /
52
the night is cold not the kind of cold that chills you and drives you in but instead the kind that draws you out, so that you can see your breath the kind of cold not cured by woven sweaters i stand like a great sentinel, a bastion of humanity amidst the uncertainty of nature i reach up, my hand caressed by gentle breeze with finger outstretched
53
Untitled (neural pattern) Ceyhun Firat
searching for a fawn always just around the next bend always too busy connecting someone elses pictures : dots in the sky instead of clues at my feet even so, there i still was, my gaze following my finger outstretched ever upward standing in the field like a great sentinel, a bastion of humanity amidst the uncertainty of nature
scorpio, big dipper, little dipper, ursa major...
and each night i watch the constellations unravel into the day
i search for warmth in the stars
and i am just as cold as i was before
like orion through forest and woodland long overgrown,
54
Fusion
Priya Chohan 37
25
Strontium
Priya Chohan 23
Lithium
Priya Chohan 11
Precession
Silent Invasion Eileen Holland
Liam Carpenter-Urquhart
Since my body won’t just disappear, I’ll love it like a beachhead, or anything else carved out by murder. Chalklines in sand. I am the trace of dead air: I stood up and found my sight and my god I’ve tried to speak, but I am the corpse of my ownbreath and I’m too busy crawling out my own mouth. Here’s what I call language, in its absence. Here’s what I call. Turning, like a season. Turning, like a barrel. Turning off the light. 61
62 14
Printing Art Communication Systems Harrisburg, PA