Youth Advisory Board Members: Janice, James, Edith, Elias, Keilani, Udval, Isaias, Marcus, Kayleena, Lori, Erika, Marlyn, Silver, Menuka, Jo, Karina, Brian
Lead Teaching Artist: Allison Leigh Holt
Assistant Teaching Artist: Jonathan Weisburst
AIE Intern: Kelley O'Leary

SoEx's Youth Advisory Board is a youth-driven afterschool program where students collaborate with professional artists to produce an art exhibition at SoEx. This Spring, YAB is producing an experimental video project with teaching artists Allison Leigh Holt and Jonathan Weisburst, in conversation with an upcoming Fall 2013 SoEx project: Difficult to Make Out. The YAB project, Out-Of-Order, seeks to challenge the thought systems that determine the nature of our experience. The project is the culmination of experimental processes and exercises across different media, and the final reception will present these experiments as well as a screening of student work.

In negotiating our human experience, we order our reality and express meaning through several languages: the spoken and written word, moving images, time and physical space. Behaviors that begin quite naturally can easily descend into routine. How do these limits affect our perception?

Through the absurdist spirit of DADA, Out-of-Order explores experimental video as a tool for interpreting and subverting conventional modes of perception, reordering these standardized languages and presenting them anew. The exhibition showcases the artists’ experimental process as well as its products. Parameters, Disruption, and Interpretation: students are developing sets of basic working principles, exercising those structures across different media, then deliberately reinterpreting those structures through video. Out-Of-Order points to our habits of thinking, reminding us to reorder them and challenge ourselves toward new visions.

ONE-ON-ONE MENTORSHIP PROGRAM
FINAL GROUP SHOW AND AWARD CEREMONY

Artist Mentors: Cal Cullen, Eliza Gregory, Veronica Graham, Jason Houck and Isaac Vazquez
Mentees: Maeve, Grace, Ubaldo, Amanda, Christian

The One-On-One Mentorship Program pairs passionate youth artists, from the ages of 16-21, with professional artist mentors, who provide guidance, develop goals, and share skills, knowledge and expertise with the mentee each week for 2 hours over the course of a year. Once a month, all pairs come together for group critiques at Southern Exposure.

The program is driven by developing and working toward achievable goals. The group collectively decided that one goal would be to produce a final show at Southern Exposure. The show explores the theme of growth, examining what artistic development looks like over a period of time. This one-night event highlights the work of the youth members and their collaboration with mentors, exploring a variety of mediums including photography, printmaking, painting, sculpture and mixed media. Each mentee’s work explores ideas ranging from identity, personal history, media perception, as well as process examinations of their respective mediums. The work will be presented to the SoEx community along side YAB's final project to highlight the achievements of the artists as they graduate from the program.

YOUTH ADVISORY BOARD:
SoEx's Youth Advisory Board is a youth-driven after-school program where students collaborate with professional artists to produce an art exhibition at SoEx. This Spring, YAB is producing an experimental video project with teaching artists Allison Leigh Holt and Jonathan Weisburst in conversation with another SoEx project: Difficult to Make Out. The YAB project, Out-Of-Order is the culmination of experimental processes and exercises across different media that explores ways of thinking about order. The final reception will present work from these processes as well as a screening of student work.

ONE-ON-ONE MENTORSHIP PROGRAM:
Southern Exposure’s One-on-One Mentorship Program pairs youth artists with professional artist mentors. Mentors nurture the youth’s creative ideas by offering support and guidance, helping to set and meet goals, and sharing skills, knowledge, and expertise through this year long program. The highly selective program seeks passionate and curious visual arts students in need of guidance, and pairs them with a professional artist in their field of interest. This program is designed and driven around the student artist’s interests and needs, as youth have studied painting, graphic novel production, photography, sculpture and spatial arts. Through these mediums mentors and mentees work together to share ideas, engage in research, and take their art practice to the next level.

This semester, pairs work to develop a youth-driven group exhibition exploring the theme of growth, examining what it artistic development looks like over a period of time. The ceremony will showcase the work of the youth members and be presented to the SoEx community along with YAB's final project.