lun.r.005

“Let the waters settle and you will see the moon and stars mirrored in your own being.”

— Rumi

O C T A M E N T A T I O N S

2020

The pandemic stretched on, protests erupted, and election politics took a violent turn. Meditation seemed a reasonable response to the chaos, and lun.r.005 takes as its subtitle a term I coined to describe the meditative practice of visualizing the movement of bodies in space: octamentation. From summer of 2020 through spring 2021, I combined photography and contemplation, and in turn the visual representations of these bodies’ movements in our sky became songs about time, memory, motion and light, photographs layered into complex montages that probe our perceptions of these heavenly objects as factors in a cosmic harmony.

This cycle builds on concepts and visual elements developed in previous cycles and expands to include the five bright planets easily visible to the human eye, often discernible even in our light-polluted city: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Photographic studies of these moons’ and planets’ occultations, conjunctions, transits, alignments, and groupings are combined to form pictures that dive these relationships and illuminate some ways that our perceptions are skewed by our limited view in space and time and how we can overcome those limitations.