the Merritt Street Transition

the Merritt Street Transition

Almost a year ago, I started work on a series of images called "the Red Balloons" primarily focused on innocence lost. The Merritt Street Transition was an unexpected one, and while I knew what it was about when finished, I chose to keep the specifics of the symbolism private, because they were very much private. But, there seems something arbitrary in the title I gave it, unless you know the specifics. After all, there is no street in the image, and the composition doesn't seem to support it. But the key to this image is not in the word street in the title, but the word 'transition. '

I wanted this to be a contradiction piece - the bright red balloons juxtaposed against the rather horrific sight of a scarred and burning face, the calm pose with the violence of his face deteriorating. The idea was a sort of nightmarish birthday boy, the general feel of a celebration gone wrong, or a party for something macabre.

So why the street?

Well, Merritt Street is a place I grew up in - my family did not stay in one house for my entire childhood, but I attribute this address to the most formative years prior to college. A lot of things changed there, and I don't mean just the rigors of puberty, though that certainly played its part. It is the site of my family fracturing, from a four person nuclear family, to a divorce fueled prism of strangers, new step parents, new boyfriends, of parents no longer towing the party line and keeping up appearances, and finally, the arrival of someone who can only be described as a menacing presence into our lives, one who brought violence, alcoholism, and brought out in me my first intense feelings of fear and hate.

The details of what happened and to whom are not important. What is significant, at least to me, and the meaning behind this image, is my life changed very suddenly, very harshly, and I did not have any control over anything that occurred. It was a span of a few years, but that home and that time in my life in some ways robbed me, and in other ways, artistically anyway, fueled me. It is hard to appreciate the events as useful or necessary to my development, and I think I am forever going to count them as dark times, where childhood was abruptly cancelled, and my course was changed all too suddenly. This is the boy with his face burned off - the loss of emotion, the loss of identity, the scarring of some hard times. The balloons in this piece, like in others in the series, represent childhood, innocence, simplicity, and though he is changing into something else, he grips those strings tightly, lest he lose all connection to them altogether.

In deciding to update this image, it was mainly technical things that I was concerned about fixing. I didn't like the green pallor of the original, I thought the scarring too blunt and the flames unconvincing. I had recently shot some stock flames and I thought this was a good opportunity to add some improvement to the pyrotechnics of the piece. Lastly, since there was little negative space in the background to work with, and it really was not the point anyway, I threw an arbitrary sky into it. This time, I wanted to give a sense of claustrophobia with the thick bushes and foliage behind him, to give the background a few notes but still keep the eyes drawn to the character and the balloons.

model: Gilberto Mendez