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Artist wins top honors

Dana Mengwasser stands beside three of her 12-photos to win a Silver Key Award in the National Scholastic Awards Contest.
By Danielle Paine, Reminder Assistant Editor

LONGMEADOW The unlikely beauty of dirty ashtrays, rotten tomatoes and peeling paint have reaped praise for high school senior Dana Mengwasser.

Months ago, Mengwasser submitted her art class portfolio of digital images to the National Scholastic Art Awards without thinking much about it. After all, it was just something seniors were required to do.

Months later, the budding photographer learned that her realistic close-ups had netted one of the competition's top state-level honors, a gold key. Later on, she received an e-mail explaining that the photographs were moved on to the 10,000-competitor national level of the competition where they had won one of 120 prestigious silver key awards.

"Basically I took close-ups of everyday objects that wouldn't normally be considered attractive and made them attractive by the way I framed them," Mengwasser explained about her award-winning portfolio.

"Like a fly whose green wings are glistening in the sun, a ketchup bottle, peeling paint and an ash tray. I just tried to make people look twice at things they wouldn't normally wouldn't and see beauty differently."

These intense focuses on texture and color are a departure for Mengwasser, whose typical medium is in black and white. A trip to China, taken with the school's East Asia Club last April, had a tremendous affect on her art, Mengwasser said, and has changed how she views beauty.

"I saw a level of destruction that I've never seen before and I had a hard time dealing with that," Mengwasser said. "In amidst all of it, someone pointed out a flower next to my foot and it was actually wilting but it was totally beautiful."

Although she has been taking photography classes since eighth grade, Mengwasser doesn't really consider herself to be an artist even while spending all of her free time behind a lens and in a dark room.

"Although I'm excited and it is a big honor, there are a lot of people out there who deserve just as much recognition as I got," Mengwasser said.

Mengwasser and her family traveled to Boston this winter to see her work on display with the other state winners. This June, they will make a similar journey to the exibition of national-level winners at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

"The ceremony in Boston was cool because I got to go and see my art being displayed for the first time on something other than cardboard boxes," Mengwasser said while standing beside her winning pictures, enlarged and mounted on cardboard boxes for the annual Longmeadow High School Senior Art Show.

In the fall, Mengwasser will attend Hampshire college where she will continue to point and shoot while exploring some of her other passions as well.

"I am interested in psychology and helping people and doing art," Mengwasser said about her future ambitions. "So a career in art therapy is a perfect way for me to balance the two things I'm passionate about."