Signed Limited Edition Prints
Here’s What You’re Looking At
These are crime scenes of resurrection. Places where words that should have died two and a half thousand years ago got dragged back into the world and pinned to landscapes that didn’t know they were waiting.
Ninety percent of Greek tragedy is gone. Burned, scraped off parchment, used as kindling, lost to flood and indifference and time.
What survived from the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are fragments. Eight lines here. Three lines there. Sometimes just a phrase that glints like bone in the dirt. The IOTA project takes those fragments and fuses them with real places — sites that carry their own weight, their own buried narratives, their own unfinished business.
A surfing statue on the Santa Cruz Westside at 5:40 in the morning during the first week of lockdown. An abandoned house outside Watsonville at dawn. A superfund site on the East Palo Alto shoreline. Dead fish heads on fence posts in San Gregorio. The hold of a 19th-century schooner. The waves off Año Nuevo at first light. These aren’t backdrops. They’re collaborators. The fragment chooses the site, or the site chooses the fragment, and when they lock together you don’t have a choice. You have to make the work.
This is site responsive theater stripped to its essentials and photographed at the moment of collision. Text and place, body and environment, the ancient and the immediate, meeting once and then gone. These prints are what remains.
What These Photos Are
Each image captures one piece of an ongoing act of excavation. Not the polite, academic kind. The kind where you wake up at 4 AM because the light will be right and the fragment demands it. The kind of compulsion that doesn’t care about grant money or tenure or a run at any theater. The text survived against all odds. The least we can do is give it a body and a place to stand.
These aren’t theatrical documentation in the usual sense. They’re the artifact of a moment that existed once, in a specific place, at a specific hour, and then dissolved. What you’re holding is the proof it happened.
Why You Might Want One
Because you understand that the best things are the ones that almost didn’t survive. Because you know that a phrase written in Athens before the common era can still cut you open on a beach in California if you put it in the right place at the right time. Because you don’t want decoration. You want evidence that someone is still listening to the dead and answering back.
Where the Money Goes
Every cent from these prints goes directly back into producing the next fragment. New sites, new texts, new collisions. This project doesn’t run on institutions or patronage. It runs on people who give enough of a damn to keep it alive. You buy a print, you fund the next piece. That’s the deal. No middleman, no overhead, no mystery.
This Is an Ongoing Project
There are hundreds of fragments left. Hundreds of sites that don’t know yet what they’re waiting for. New work gets made as the fragments demand it, at whatever hour, in whatever weather, in whatever impossible place the text and the landscape decide to meet. This doesn’t end until the fragments run out, and they won’t.
The dead wrote these words. The world forgot them. We’re bringing them back, one site at a time.
