Valley Stream South High School art talent on display at The Firefly Artists gallery

Paintings from dozens of art educators and students on Long Island were put on exhibit earlier this year at The Firefly Artists gallery, a beloved bastion of eclectic, local artistry, in Northport. Artwork from two art teachers and two students from Valley Stream South High School were among the featured works.

For South art teacher, Edward Lee, deciding on which student to pair up with for the exhibit was a no-brainer. It had to be junior art student Hannah Wallach.

“I knew right away it was her,” he said. “Her pieces have such strong meaning behind them, and the light was all over her.”

Wallach’s sculpture, titled “Trapped in Social Media,” features a clay figurine placed inside a translucent box. Around the box are various posts and comments of the kind you’d find swirling around your social media feed.

“It’s a black figure that’s supposed to represent a human wasting away inside a box, and the box represents an Instagram page or a TikTok page,” said Wallach.

It’s a crystal-clear metaphor for the stranglehold social media can have on our mental and emotional lives as teens.

“I think most people my age can relate to it. You could go on social media for five minutes, and then 20 to 30 minutes later, you sort of snap back to reality,” said Wallach. “And you’re like, this wasn’t what you wanted, you got lost somewhere in there, essentially.”

While Wallach’s art centered around the modern plights of the digital world, Lee’s art drew from the sentimental and the historical. In his gouache painting, titled St. John’s Home Military Band 1926, he recreates an old family photograph.

“The piece I displayed captured a photo of my grandfather and my great uncle when they were in a home for boys back in the 20’s in Brooklyn,” said Lee. “So the small little image that I had, I blew it up and added color almost to kind of bring it to life, almost 100 years from when it was taken.”

The tug of the past also bears heavily on the piece exhibited by art student Laiba Ismail.  “Across the Indigo Mountains” is a landscape painting in which the viewer is situated up on the icy peaks of blue mountains — a place reminiscent of Ismail’s youth in her home country of Pakistan.

“I was surrounded by mountains there as well as the rest of my relatives that are not with me here in the U.S.,” said Ismail. “So the work expresses my love for nature and practically my love for my family and home country.

It’s top-notch work according to Ismail’s art teacher, Katherine Aragon, who complemented her student’s landscape painting with her own, titled: “Quiet Moments.”

“The painting captures the scene of a field in November of kind of this moment of kind of quieting down and getting ready for the hibernation of winter,” said Aragon. “So kind of those moments where you kind of pull back and you kind of reflect on the year.”