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Truth in war, religion, and art

Mason Gross visual arts grad connects creativity and service

By Ashanti M. Alvarez

Daniel “Zeke” Balan was always an artist: in touch with his spiritual side, wanting to explore his cultural roots, scribbling cartoons in a sketchpad with his older brother.

So he surprised friends when he announced that he was considering joining the United States Army.

“I would get the reactions, ‘You can’t be in the Army, you’re too much of a rebel, an individual, a typical kind of artist,’” recalled Balan, who recently received his M.F.A. in visual arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts. “I would probably be lying if I said there weren’t some small connection to the sense of wanting to disprove that because I am an artist, I am not that kind of physical person.”

So Balan joined the Army in March of 2000. He was in training on September 11, 2001. Three months after the plane hijackings and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Balan was deployed to Afghanistan, where he worked as a Russian translator and interrogator of terror suspects and Taliban members.

Balan is still processing his time in the Army; he was honorably discharged in 2004. “I have just started to give it a place in my life history,” Balan said. He is working on incorporating his experiences into his style of art, which explores the relationship between the actual and the spiritual, mankind’s relationship with God, and truth.

Afghanistan gave him ripe opportunities to think about the meaning of truth. He spent his days seeking truth from and trying to see through the lies of prisoners in Afghanistan. And the experience gave Balan a more nuanced perspective on media narratives as truth.

“It was an amazing experience seeing politics in action,” he said. “I remember being on guard duty and hearing [a cable news] anchorman rehearse before he went live. I don’t know if it’s what he had been told by Army public affairs officers, but what he was saying – that the previous night, forces guarding the Kandahar Airport had beaten back a large assault by the Taliban – was not at all what was going on.”

Balan specializes in religious art. He was always engaged in cultural and spiritual exploration. Balan, who grew up in Ohio, Texas, and went to high school in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, converted to Catholicism as a high school student, taking the confirmation name “Ezekiel,” hence his nickname. He took a six-month internship with the Ukrainian National Committee Art Historical Commission after he graduated from the University of Dallas.

“I knew I didn’t want to go right into school again. I wanted to spend some time overseas. Specifically I wanted to see this land of my family’s roots,” said Balan, who also worked as an ESL art teacher in Kiev. Now he teaches art to students at St. Peter's Elementary School in New Brunswick.

Balan’s explorations into his family history, his spirituality, and his physical and mental capabilities have led him to shift his focus as an artist.

“I think young artists think about being famous or starting a big movement in the art world, being very influential in the history of art,” Balan said. “Of course, those would still be great things, but I could chase those things my whole life and never achieve them. I could do more in service to my family and local community.”

Balan is working on designing a chapel at his church, St. Paul the Apostle in Highland Park. His M.F.A. thesis project, shown at Mason Gross Galleries, was a chapel designed as a military bunker that took 10 tons of concrete to build. He also has created works for the U.S. Army, the Ukrainian National Committee, and the Islamic State of Afghanistan. He looks to his wife, Margo, and their two young boys, as well as his octogenarian grandfather-in-law, William Schickel, for inspiration. “He’s been an artist his whole life. Never had a regular day job, he just made art. That was his career,” Balan said. “He’s not terribly famous. He designed interfaith churches, chapels for hospitals. He worked on the renovation of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky with [prominent Catholic author] Thomas Merton. He just made art for people.”