BELFAST—Last Friday, March 4, dozens of kids as young as four up to teenagers were milling through the hallways of Waterfall Arts’ second annual “Young Artists’ Gallery Takeover” – an opportunity to highlight Waldo County visual arts programs and put the spotlight on local artists under age 18. Many of those kids, were, in fact, the artists themselves.

I met Elias Dodge, 14, who is homeschooled. He was busy rolling black black acrylic paint over a foam collage that Waterfall Arts’ BRIDGE teen artists constructed for the opening to give away as free posters. BRIDGE is a free after-school art program for sixth graders, most of whom have no art class in school.

Part of the BRIDGE group for the last three years, Dodge, it turns out wasn’t just making posters. He himself, had a piece in the show that had already caught my eye before meeting him.

“I like working in collages,” he said. “Some people call me ‘The Collage Man.’”

The piece was titled City done in a collage of mixed media. [Click on the photo to enlarge the detail.] The art depicts a city scene with an ominous undertone blending colorful peacetime images of children in the streets with children in the past wearing gas masks. 

“I decided I was going to make a city out of cut out photos and found some old WWII photos online and printed them out,” he said. “I then found this website about kids who had to do these wartime drills and had to put gas masks on in school.”

He’s not sure if he sees his dystopic artwork as political in nature or where it truly originates from.

“I was just interested in these kids and their stories and their faces portray a lot of emotion. The kids were trying to get the gas masks off because they were really uncomfortable.”

He said he cannot imagine going to school and having to wear that.

It took about a year for the piece to fully come together.

“Some things I put in and then took out because they didn’t fit.”

“I did one side in color and one side in black and white and joined them together as one city,” he said. I tried to portray some of the people in the collage as bad people; they didn’t have good ideas.They were like robots.” Dodge elaborated on the landscape. “It’s just a city where people don’t really care and just want to make money.”

Dodge’s piece was among more than 250 pieces of kids’ artwork on display in the Clifford Gallery and both floors of the Corridor Gallery. As part of Arts Advocacy Month, the pieces will be on display until March 30.

We will be highlighting other artists from that show in future articles—stay tuned. For more information visit: http://waterfallarts.org/young-artists-gallery-takeover/

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com