What You're Looking At...
8:01 in the evening, May 4th, 2015. The Emeryville Mudflats. That strange, forgotten margin between Oakland and the Bay Bridge where people have been building junk sculptures out of wreckage and defiance for decades, where the industrial waterfront bleeds into wetland and the cranes of the Port of Oakland stand on the horizon like steel sentinels guarding nothing in particular. This is not where you expect to find Sophocles. Which is exactly why he belongs here.
A figure stands next to one of those mudflat sculptures, a creature assembled from rust and driftwood and stubbornness, and speaks the surviving fragments of Sinon. The great liar of the Trojan War. The man who convinced an entire city to drag its own destruction through the gates. A few lines of text that survived the wreck of antiquity, performed in a landscape built entirely from wreckage. You couldn’t design that if you tried. The site and the text found each other the way certain things do, not through planning but through a kind of inevitability that only makes sense after the fact.
The light is going. The water is flat and dark. The cranes and the refineries hover in the haze like a painting of the end of something. And Sinon, history’s most successful fraud, gets his voice back in a place where nothing is permanent and everything is built from what got left behind.
This is part of IOTA, an ongoing project that takes the surviving fragments of the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and puts them back in the world, in places the world has half forgotten. 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.
