The Veins of Men
micron pens, graphite, pastel, eraser, over digital print on bristol board
8" x 10" each
“He saw the veins of men
as a net the gods made to catch us in like wild beasts:
he tried to break through it.”
from George Seferis, “Euripides the Athenian”
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 brutal struggle for power in Greece after World War II. The Veins of Men is a series of drawings responding to those films; drawings in which I repurpose ancient narratives to address current dilemmas, using hybridized fragments of artifacts and images from both the modern and the ancient worlds.
In The Veins of Men, I experiment with condensing separate scenes from the three narratives and conflating them within single frames to bring focus to the unseen entanglements that bind these ancient stories into such a persistent vision of our human position. These entangled relationships are also evoked by the net that is a central feature of the series, the veins; the existential web of fate and circumstance that governs each of our lives; that enmeshes us within the social and cultural networks that define who we are and what is possible for us at any given moment in history.
