Scenes from Iphigenia, 2023

from the series A Misbegotten War

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Greek-Cypriot filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis cinematically adapted three tragedies by Euripides dealing with the Trojan War and its aftermath, speaking through them to the turmoil resulting from the brutal Cold War proxy struggle for power in Greece after World War II.  My series of mixed media paintings on paper, A Misbegotten War, is in response to those films; fifty-eight compositions in which I repurpose these ancient narratives to address current dilemmas, using hybridized fragments of artifacts and images from both the modern and the ancient worlds.  The paintings are based on Vinyl Euripides, my 2022 installation at the Cacoyannis Foundation in Athens, which thematically builds on Cacoyannis’ cinematic restaging of Electra (1962), The Trojan Women (1971), and Iphigenia (1977).