New Haven Independent

Five totems composed of these recycled materials, called “Babel Collection,” were raised 15 and 19 feet high and plunked, to stabilize them, three feet into the hard ground.

The achievement was celebrated Thursday afternoon at Artspace’s lot at Chapel on Orange, where the works will stand for a month.

It was the culmination of Artspace’s ninth annual summer apprenticeship program for area high school students.

“That teddy bear came from home,” said Natalie Zelinsky (pictured at the top), a recent Educational Center for the Arts graduate of and one of the 11 young artists working with Brooklyn-based sculptor Carolyn Salas, on the three-weeks long project.

The tawny hamster at the very top came from home too.

But this was hardly an adolescent undertaking. The sophistication of the five totems bespeaks how parts become a whole.

Artist Salas (pictured with one of the teenage fabricators, Common Ground sophomore Nelson Ruiz) said she called her work “Babel Collections” because “New Haven seems like a place where there’s economic strife, an imbalance in the community.”

She wanted to work with the kids to right that imbalance by bringing art and communication together.

“This location is fraught with problems,” said Artspace curator Liza Statton. “The real test is whether they will stand and not be marred, and ask people to contemplate them.

“Not what they mean,” she added, “but what they are.”

The teens functioned primarily as the fasteners, attachers, and fabricators of Salas’ vision.

Career High senior Ashley LaRue (pictured with her friend Terence Smith, who’d come to congratulate her on the work) said it was easy but also frustrating not being in charge of the end product herself. When she saw it, though, she said, “I was proud.”

Smith went way beyond that: Looking at the clothes, bed sheets, ripped apart and then re-sewn fabric, the crutches, and the CDs that composed three of the five totems, he declared, “It’s crazy, creative, diverse. When I walked back here, I said, Wow! I sat here ten minutes just counting all the things. It’s eye-popping.”

He noted that despite the huge variety, the totems don’t look “slapped together” at all.

Photographer Molly Gambardella, another ECA student, helped to drill holes and then caulk and gorilla glue the lamps and vases for this totem. “This seemed at first just an experience, but not art,” she said.

She said they didn’t know the image Salas had in her head, “but as we worked on it, it became more clear. It turned into its own kind of art.”

Such collaboration was one of the main points, according to Artspace’s Statton.

“Kids are learning,” she said, “that they don’t have to be a painter to be an artist.”

Also being dispelled, she said, is “the big myth that art perpetuates — the lone genius.”

She said the collaboration, the kids serving as fabricators and facilitators of another’s vision, helps to dispel that myth.

The mayor dropped by to chat with the artists and ask them how they managed a personal sense of creativity in the collective enterprise. They told him.

“Did you get paid for this?” he asked.

Answer: For the three weeks commitment of three hours per day, the 11 high schoolers received $150 each. Perhaps that was another lesson about art and the art world.

The summer apprenticeship program was funded by Bank of America, Svigal and Partners, Hulls, and Home Depot, among other area businesses.