Unknown Constellation

Some time in 1988, I found a copy of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which mysteriously ended up in my family’s household. The jacket was long gone by the time I pulled the book from its place, leaving behind a rectangle of dust from its long rest on the shelf. The giant black book sat heavily on my pale legs day after day as I looked and attempted to make sense of what I found there. Like Alice’s before me, my world seemed to simultaneously expand and shrink, a dizzying experience. When I began making these pictures in 2010, looking at the ground glass of my camera reminded me of finding this book and the feeling of seeing something for the first time. I was looking for visual connections between our scientific understanding of the world and our human experience of it. I still am, in drastically different ways.