STARGAZER ARTIST STATEMENT: “ We're all made of stardust………”

In the summer of 2005, on a fellowship from the School Of the Art Institute of Chicago, I set out on a photographic expedition through Latvia, my ancestral homeland. I was seeking the ancient sacred sites of whose existence my mother had enlightened me years ago. These sacred sites were, and still are, recognized as places of great healing & prophetic powers and what intrigued me most, possible inter-dimensional portals where time and space are experienced in an extraordinary way. Later, I took these images of sacred lakes, streams& springs, sacred rocks & trees, sculptures of angels & Masters, (later I added some imagery from North America), and “married” them with images that the Hubble Space Telescope was sending back to us from the deep heart of the cosmos. My friend, Tom Springer, author of “Looking for Hickories: The Forgotten Wildness of the Rural Midwest”, said it best: “These are beautiful! For me, the Hubble images come as close to anything I've ever seen to what a picture of God should look like (the old man with a beard/Charlton Heston look has never worked for me). So I really like the idea of pairing them with earthly images, which are in many respects a different side of the same coin. At a basic level, we're all made of stardust, right?”