Issue 3 - Searching - Symposeum Magazine

Issue 3 - Searching

Views from Walden Woods: A Triptych

Left to Right: Autumn, View from the Emerson-Thoreau Amble (2018) | Autumn, View from Walden Woods (2018) | Concord Grape Vine, Ralph Waldo Emerson House (2018) Artist’s Note The images featured in this issue are from my series Transcendental Concord (Radius Books, 2018). The series

Issue 3 - Searching

Reaching for the Stars

Reaching for the Stars, micron pen on illustration board, 10" x 8", 2021American Dream, photograph, 10" x 8", 2021 Artist’s Note For so many people, America represents a place of new beginnings and new opportunities. That’s why in 2007, my family traveled

Issue 3 - Searching

Series of paintings for Symposeum by Lucy Villeneuve

Lemonade, acrylic on canvas, 20" x 24" (2021)Currently, acrylic on canvas, 20" x 24" (2021)Sunday, acrylic on canvas, 20" x 24" (2021)Marshmallow, acrylic on canvas, 20" x 24" (2021)Yurt, acrylic on canvas, 16" x 20" (2021) Artist’s Note I

Issue 3 - Searching

Home is where you find it

T he path to the summit of Scotts Bluff National Monument is Nebraska at its best. Morning walks among sweeping panoramas in the serenity of the prairie are treasured rituals for many of us who live nearby. So in 2015, when 25,000 tons

Issue 3 - Searching

Searching for the Blue

#1, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2020)#2, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2020)#3, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2020)#4, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2020)#5, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2021)#6, acrylic on paper,

Issue 3 - Searching

The Black Dogs of Enlightenment

T he setting was old Tbilisi, a strange destination, fable-like. The rough brown bricks of the ancient baths, the second-story verandas, enclosed in the vernacular architectural style. The dry cliff faces and banks rising in random juts around the city. Scrub vegetation. In truth,

Issue 3 - Searching

Jamais

Poet’s Note I first realized that I was a multiracial person in kindergarten. When my mother came to eat lunch with me one day at school, her presence bewildered some of the other children. Many asked me afterwards if I was adopted. One

Issue 3 - Searching

Letter to Readers

Dear Reader, T he theme for this issue was chosen nearly half a year ago, before the delta variant, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and other unpredictable events. We are left searching now even more than we were then: for the right thing

Issue 3 - Searching

Tracking Your Life

A s a boy I spent every day in the South African bushveld apprenticing under some of the greatest Shangaan animal trackers in the world. I was taught to attune to a hidden world of stories and information etched faintly in the earth as

Issue 3 - Searching

Cartoons on Searching by Brooke Bourgeois

Artist’s Note Brooke is a cartoonist and illustrator who primarily finds inspiration at the intersection of unlikely themes. She is constantly ‘searching’ for jokes that are specifically suited to visual anchors, and this often involves re-imagining historical periods, fairy tale characters, and even

Issue 3 - Searching

Terrain

Haven't I shared all my memories already? Sweated into ink the anchored years When the sun drove us like a team of plough-horses through the summer sky? No, I’ve kept a few things back, fears now half-forgotten, loves remembered always but never acted

Star Tours: The Rise of Space Tourism and the Return of the Sublime

Issue 3 - Searching

Star Tours: The Rise of Space Tourism and the Return of the Sublime

O n the dusty morning of July 11, 2021, two hundred miles south of Albuquerque, Sir Richard Branson squeezed into a blue and gold jumpsuit and shot into space. He

Issue 3 - Searching

Big Stories: They Still Matter

P erhaps, like me, you’ve noticed a curious sort of temporality since the pandemic began. Time is passing both unbearably slowly and frighteningly quickly. The slow dragging days add up before they come to pass. History seems to outpace itself, leaving absences of

Issue 3 - Searching

Searching in the Dark: The Case for Dark Matter

*The artwork featured in this piece was done in collaboration with digital artist Kendra Oliver, an educator and artist living in Pittsburgh. O n a September evening in 1846, German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle received a letter requesting that he point his telescope at

Issue 3 - Searching

The Cloud and the Fire

*The following piece contains passages that may be best suited for a mature audience. T his play is based on a true story. Its lessons are manifold: Don’t ride in elevators. Be nice to gay people. See to it that your lady finishes,

Issue 3 - Searching

Artwork by Rebecca Arp

Can the body be a searchlight (Eye) (2021)glass, lead, fluxUntitled (Sea Ache) (2021)deceased grandfather's oar, acrylic | paraffin wax, tissue paper, ink Artist’s Note My artistic practice concerns emotion, memory, ritual, and spirituality as seen through the lens of my experiences as

Issue 3 - Searching

Antibiotics: To the Clerk at the Pet Shop, Chicago, Lower West Side

S ince we didn’t make it to that pet shop, let’s just say we’re still on our way there. I write “we” because I wasn’t looking for it alone. Actually, all of this happened only because there was a “you”

Issue 3 - Searching

Shooting Stars after Shooting Penguins in Frigid Isolation for 27 Years

A nature photographer pivots into the world of paparazzi. A fter twenty-seven years of documenting penguins in Antarctica, I was desperately searching for a new career. I left behind the desolate, frozen tundra devoid of any human interaction for New York City. On my

Issue 3 at a Glance

Series of paintings for Symposeum | In her series of paintings composed specifically for Symposeum, Lucy Villeneuve evokes a sense of self-discovery in the act of searching. Cartoons on Searching | New Yorker cartoonist Brooke Bourgeois finds inspiration at the intersection of unlikely themes. Scenes from

Issue 3 - Searching

The Ends of Information: Searching for Truth in the Digital Age

"T he universe,” wrote the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, “(which others call the library), is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.” The library in question is the imaginary

Issue 3 - Searching

The Long Now

Photos C/O Nowk Choe Daniel Schine Lee’s “Jam and Cook” (a functional karaoke machine + oven) and “Pagoda Go-Go” (an 80s-esque analogue of Heelys) mock the cynical manipulation of trends for profit, while also asking whether art and culture cannot be meaningful despite

Issue 3 - Searching

To J—

Your browser does not support the audio element. Poet’s Note I never sent this letter to J– because it wasn’t written for him. I wrote it for S–, for me, and for anyone else searching for healing after a bad romance. People

Issue 3 - Searching

Lost & Found

Shh, shh, shh... Breezes caper in the dogwoods; white petals twirl onto the sidewalk. The air smells green, and sweet, and forgiving. Shh, shh, shh... White wicker rocker creaks in the gloaming. My sister moves her downy head into the blanket and breast. She

Issue 3 - Searching

On My Mother's Passing

Your mellow touch has gone, off with the Blue, red flashing lights that came for you on That day. I hadn't noticed life being taken From you, seized a little bit too rudely, S0 quietly in the morning, the days, nights, I feel the

Issue 3 - Searching

SABBATICAL

And did you get what You wanted from this life, even so? —Raymond Carver, "Late Fragment" T he heat was historic. “This heat is historic,” they’d said on NPR. At Pike Place fishmongers were selling their souls for ice. The biologist visited each