Dionysos SOS
1987-89
Oil on canvas
45 5/8 x 35 in.
The artist wrote and crossed out the previous title “A Chain of Radioactive Daughters” on the back of the canvas. In an unpublished journal she explains, “A chain of Radioactive Daughters, but there are only two. Hardly a chain I know, but that's how I saw it (how it started). Radioactively Accumulative.”
The phrase “A chain of Radioactive Daughters” may refer to lines from James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, in a section about the apocalyptic power of nuclear weapons: “While heavy-water nymphs, fettered in chain / Reaction sang their soft refrain, Refrain”
