What You're Looking At...
6:57 in the morning, April 7th, 2016. Top of Slacker Hill, Marin Headlands. The fog is doing what fog does up there, rolling through the valleys like it owns the place, swallowing the ridgelines, turning the whole landscape into something between a dream and a threat. And on the edge of a rock outcrop, a figure seated at the lip of all that emptiness, white fabric caught by the wind and streaming behind her like she’s halfway between solid and vapor, arms thrown open to the clouds closing in from every direction.
This is Muriel Maffre. Former principal dancer with San Francisco Ballet. Ryan Tacata is here too. And they are performing fragments of a lost Euripides tragedy on a mountaintop at dawn because the text demanded it. The fragment tells the myth of Zeus seducing Io in the form of a cloud. Read that again. A god becomes weather to get what he wants. And here on Slacker Hill, where the clouds don’t just surround you but move through you, where the boundary between body and atmosphere genuinely dissolves, the myth stops being a myth. It becomes the condition you’re standing in.
I called it Love is The Fullest Education. And there’s something in this image, that figure on the precipice, fabric and fog becoming the same thing, the Headlands dropping away into nothing below, that makes you understand why the Greeks didn’t separate the divine from the natural world. The gods weren’t up there somewhere. They were the wind. They were the cloud. They were the thing that touched you before you understood what was happening.
This is part of IOTA, an ongoing project that takes the surviving fragments of the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and brings them back to life in the places that deserve them. Every print sold goes directly back into producing the next fragment.
Signed limited edition. 11″ x 17″, run of 25. Image approximately 10″ x 16″, stamped on verso. Printed on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.
Edition of 10. You know the price.
