PRISM

When selecting our theme, we imagined our future submissions. What do we make art for? In a room of teenagers, the most common answer was time: growing up, coming of age, endings and beginnings. Years are slower when you’re younger, and, because we feel we spend so much time with each section of our lives, we like to break them down into smaller, more manageable pieces. We think in terms of days and weeks instead of months and years. Our stories follow this same principle.

The outline of Silent Voices: PRISM is based on Freytag’s Pyramid, a narrative structure composed of five distinct sections, or acts, developed by Gustav Freytag and borrowed from Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s “Ars Poetica.” Silent Voices gives Woodward artists a structured space to create just as Freytag’s pyramid gives all artists a framework of rules to follow and occasionally break. The optical prism, similar in shape to the pyramid, uses refracting surfaces to separate white light into the full spectrum of colors. A prism exposes the hidden beauty of light by revealing its unique composition, and Freytag’s Pyramid exposes the inner workings of a story so that we may admire its natural complexity. The literary and visual themes of works featured in each act serve as trail markers for the reader as they journey through the narrative: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouncement.