Ophelia

DATE: Nov 21, 2008   PHOTOGRAPHER: ScottSmallin

FATALITY SAYS: “This set is a visual reference to John Everett Millais' painting, Ophelia.

Indirectly, it acknowledges love, suicide, and mental instability - at once plagues and fascinations.

Shakespeare's Ophelia - erotically open-armed and upward-gazed - floats to her watery death. Millais showed her - modeled by the muse Elizabeth Siddal posing afloat in a bathtub - amidst beautiful natural detail, which was a hallmark of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This movement has been considered one of the first avant-garde art groups, as it favored having and expressing genuine ideas, studying nature, and appreciating the heartfelt over mechanical and rote processes.

This set is my homage to that, all of that.

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There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples...
Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.”