Night gallery: Teen artists
find inspiration in Dante’s dark, disturbing ‘Inferno’
By Joanne Silver
Tuesday, July 6, 2004
For Silvi Naci,
Dante’s “Inferno” vividly recalled that September morning,
a month after her family arrived in Boston from Albania, when New York’s
World Trade Center towers exploded in a ball of fire. The Italian masterpiece
filled Patrick Garrity’s imagination with images of a mountain and
waterfall crying tears of pain. Joshua Truitt read the poem with an eye
to the approaching war in Iraq. As he pictured Dante’s desert with
its rain of fire, the high school junior thought of the Middle East, but
also of other wastelands, including the rain of fire that more than half
a century ago swept through Hiroshima.
Thanks to a junior course taught by Beth Balliro
at the Boston Arts Academy, all three teenagers have turned their ideas
into compelling art. “Living Inferno: Boston Arts Academy Responds
to Dante’s ‘Inferno’,” at the Bromfield Gallery, offers
the public a chance to see the visual wealth that this 700-year-old poetic
text still inspires. Anyone who encounters the three dozen drawings, paintings
and mixed-media works in this exhibition will be startled by the expressive
depth and artistic skill of the students. At only 15, 16 or 17 years of
age, each artist was able to connect with the vision of the medieval writer
and then translate that connection into something with contemporary meaning.
Dante began his story, “Midway on our
life’s journey, I found myself/ In dark woods.” (From the translation
by Robert Pinsky, which Balliro’s class read. Artist Michael Mazur,
who created the haunting illustrations for this version, and Pinsky both
have visited Balliro’s Dante class.) Teenagers from Dorchester, Hyde
Park and Chelsea might not yet be in the middle of their own lives or very
close to a forest. By immersing themselves in a classic rich in metaphor,
however, they found routes into Dante’s perilous terrain.
One recent afternoon, Balliro and several
of her students from the Dante course came to the gallery to see the exhibition
and talk about the journeys that led them there. Naci stood beside her mixed-media
“The Towers of Death” and described the feelings that eventually
took the shape of eerily glowing buildings, roiling colors and a blood-red
skeleton with a serpent's tongue. “It was an explosion in myself,”
she said. “Moving here in America was the biggest trauma. It was like
a bomb. The only words I knew were ‘Me no English.’ I never got
to feel what other people felt. After reading the ‘Inferno,’ I
tried to be in their world with the emotions.” She summoned up colors
for the significance they had in her native Albania - blue for peace, yellow
for hope, red for love, black for darkness, even hell.
Black stitches resembling surgical sutures
bind the fragments of paper in Laura Maguire’s “I saw the livid
stone which lined the channel,/ Both walls and floor were full of tiles,
all round/ and of an equal size.” A central room is pierced with holes
but offers no exit. Outside it, shadowy woods, turbulence and ghostly abstractions
threaten.
Garrity experimented with a series of ink
drawings of gallows, arms and faces before developing his major piece about
the mountains and waterfall. “There's so much you can do with the ‘Inferno,’
so many ways you can relate to it,” he said. “A lot of us used
ink. The story is so dark. The nature of ink demonstrates the feeling of
the story. Ink has so many values in it. You can make it drip. You can make
it really crisp.”
His classmate Truitt employed more violent
techniques to carry the image of his mixed-media-on-wood “Aftermath.”
“I wanted to show what was going on emotionally,” he explained.
Woodburning literally ate away at the surface of his apocalyptic scene,
as did bleach applied to create the illusion of smoke amid the devastation.
Even across centuries and generations, Dante’s story of darkness and
light has not lost its power to guide artists on their path.
( “Living Inferno: Boston Arts Academy Responds to Dante’s
‘Inferno’,” at the Bromfield Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave.,
Boston. Through July 17). Opening reception: Friday from 5:30 to 7:30
p.m. Free. 617-451-3605. )
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