| According to Greek myth, Hercules murdered his
family. When he realized what he had done, he prayed to the god Apollo for guidance,
and Apollo sent him to serve Eurystheus, king of Tiryns and Mycenae. For his
punishment, King Eurystheus ordered Hercules to perform twelve seemingly impossible
labors. Michael
Spafford has made the Labors of Hercules the subject matter of his work
numerous times. Now he and his son Spike
Mafford are collaborating on a new interpretation. In October of 2000
Spafford and Mafford went to Greece to visit the legendary sites of the first six of these
labors. They traveled to six locations on the Peloponnesian peninsula - Nemea,
Lerna, Cerynea, Erymanthus, Stymphalos, and Elis - and Mafford photographed each of the
sites. Both artists see this collaboration as a work in process. They
have hopes of finding landscapes suitable for the second six labors and increasing the
scale of the work.
Shared Labors included individual work by each artist as well as
work they have produced together. Spike Mafford's chromogenic dye-coupler prints of
the Greek landscape, some conceived as independent works and others as part of the
collaboration, will be on view. Michael Spafford has completed a third suite of
woodcuts of Hercules' labors (earlier versions were executed in 1979 and 1993) and these,
printed on both Arches paper and Mafford photographs, were included. The front wall
of the gallery featured Mafford and Spafford's largest collaborative work to date - twelve
oil paintings on twenty-eight inch square chromogenic dye-coupler prints. |
