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Hox Zodiac The Hox genes are the genetic material that is shared across all animals.   Essentially all members of the animal kingdom start off the same but when going through the stage of cellular development as embryos we start to look different.   To display how there is a clear link between all creatures the artist, our professor, used the Chinese zodiac’s animal avatars’ embryonic state to display the physical similarities before there are stark differences.   When seeing how all the animal look almost identical and understanding how we, as humans, have the same cellular make up; I couldn’t help but to feel more of the interconnectedness between the animal kingdom and I.   The artwork brought evolutionary differences to the forefront and I could not help but to wonder where the planet would be if natural selection favored other species. This theme explored the similarities and differences through amazing 2 story tall paintings on silk and graphs that

One of my earliest memories of the bridge between space and was the constellations.   I was fascinated with the story of Orion, his belt, and how the goddess Artemis placed him among the heavens as greek mythology was a childhood interest of mine.    A number of the constellations had religious reverence (Mullen, 2011).   Even in Christianity, there was a link between the space and the divine and the book Paradiso (part of the Divine Comedy by Dante) uses celestial spheres to outline the path a soul takes when ascending to God (Alighieri, 1952). I’ve come to learn that farmers were some of the first people to appreciate constellations as they used them to tell the time of year in areas that did not have much of a differentiation between seasonal weather, which can effect agriculture (Dolan, 2018).   But I have a vivid memory of my second grade teacher explaining how the Big Dipper was used for navigation and its link to black history (Gooley, 2018).   Sla