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?�