Poetry, Soldering & Bravery

Happy Holidays from everyone at SOHO!

 This week was the last week before our long holiday break. We started Girl Talk by writing our names and drawing a picture or writing how we were feeling when we came in on the white board. Then everyone sat in a circle and chatted about everyone was doing and feeling. This opening circle time is a place where big and little sisters can talk about what's going on in their lives - whether its funny, interesting or stressful. 

This time, Girl Talk was all about ourselves! Tesni started off the night by reading them a poem she wrote - something Tesni doesn't normally do. The only parameters for the "poem" were that each line had to start with "I am..."  After this the line could branch off and talk about all sorts of things things: family members, favorite things, activities, hobbies, friends, qualities, adjectives, objects, etc. The poem was meant to be free and talk about who we are as a person; it didn't have to be grammatically correct or rhyme.

Everyone split up, got comfy, and wrote their own poem. Tesni was sure to tell them we would share at least one line of our poem with the group. After about 15-20 minutes everyone came back into circle and read either one line or the whole poem. To our surprise, every girl read their whole poem! After they were all read, Tesni came around and gave everyone a "word bubble" where each girl wrote their favorite line. After class we all took photos with our bubbles! 

We'll talk more about photography after the break and what exciting things are happening in the darkroom!

After snack, all the big and little sisters came together and headed down to the VisArts metal and jewelry studio.  Everyone was able to learn how to solder necklaces with an image of their choosing! This activity is always really fun because it feels a little more dangerous, and we get to work in a fun professional studio (don't worry-

we take all the necessary safety precautions-of course!). Everyone watched out for each other, trusted each other, and learned how to use these crazy tools! Everyone stayed safe and everyone was able to try out the soldering practicing - even if they were a little timid or scare at first.

The group had closing circle in the jewelry studio tonight so that everyone would have time to finish their necklaces. Everyone said goodbye to each other - for three whole weeks! It was a big, loud, excited goodbye. Everyone's excited for the holidays...

See you in the new year!

PS. Bill Moretz from Pro Camera in Charlottesville gave us a great deal on 10 film cameras for SOHO! A big thank you to Bill for this generosity!

 

Scavenger Hunts, Screen Printing and Reflections 

We hope all of you had a wonderful thanks giving!  It was nice to share stories this week about the girls long weekend and how they celebrated thanksgiving.

This week at SOHO was especially action-packed! Our girl talk was the same class as last time but with a new group of girls (remember hula hoops and candy-reaching?).  This week's class was equally as entertaining, fun and meaningful. There were a lot of cute and especially moving moments when girls discussed what they were most proud of and when we again discussed teamwork at the end of the activity. Some of our favorite solutions to the candy-outside-of-the-hoop problem were when one group stuck a pencil into the mechanical pencil and then made a really long stick to reach more candy and another group who used one of the stickers to tape two of the pencils together in order to reach more. We were really impressed with the creativity and MacGyver-like skills involved!

Liana and her photography class  began to truly dive into learning the basics of taking great photographs with 35mm cameras. Each little sister and big sister received a camera from Liana. They even gave the cameras cute names and signed a contract vowing to "never neglect" the camera they were receiving. 

Liana then went through the basic concepts of photography and how the cameras worked. She talked about the shutter speed, aperture and focus.  Each girl practice focusing on different objects around the room, then each pair worked together to load film into the camera.

Then it was Scavenger Hunt time!  Little sisters and big sisters roamed the building to take photographs according to a list given to them by Liana (for ex. take a picture of you and your big sister's shoes...).  The girls got pretty creative! And they did a great job of remembering to adjust the focus for each picture and to pay attention to how much light was in the room so that their film speed and aperture settings would work correctly.  Next week they'll get to develop their film and see how their pictures came out!

After a quick snack with everyone, all of the girls headed into VisArts' True F. Luck Gallery to get a tour from Caroline Wright, whose job is to bring really awesome things to the gallery and to VisArts! The current show, called "Reflections", is a unique show that is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Visual Arts Center. All of the gallery walls are covered from floor to ceiling in hand screen-printed images.  These images create layers of photos of all of the of people and things that are connected to Visarts. The subsequent collage is a beautiful collage of colors and community! The exhibition is obviously very visually interesting, especially when you understand how many people and how much time was put into screening all of these images - something the girls would learn very soon!

Caroline explained that the collage was screen-printed for a few reasons. One is that  the gallery strives to alternate its shows to highlight what goes on in each of our studios. Printmaking is something that's important to VisArts and we wanted to highlight it. The second reason is because screen printing took the art world by storm in the 1960's -- when VisArts was founded!  Everything was considered when creating the exhibition: the color palette is inspired by the sixties, the bottom layers show the oldest images while the topmost layers show the newest, etc. 

The girls walked around and were told that they, too, were a part of the VisArts community and that they were on the wall! The girls were immediately surprised and started searching for their image on the wall.  Once we found it, we all just had to take a picture in front of our picture! Many thanks to Caroline for the awesome tour!

 

Tesni took the girls into the printmaking studio to show the girls how you expose, burn and rinse the screens before printing.  Then it was on to the familiar fiber studio to learn how to print! We learned the vocabulary involved with the process of printing, and went to it! Tesni, along with Rachel Cohn (another awesome VisArts instructor) and Jordan Roeder (SOHO's coordinator) all helped the little sisters and big sisters print t-shirts, a card, and a poster in the layered and colorful style of the "Reflections" show. 

 All of the images had something to do with SOHO: the photo of everyone together on the first night, our logo, a line drawing of a camera, the RVA symbol, and the VisArts logo.  Probably our favorite part of screen printing was when the girls and their big sisters first lifted their printed screens up to see if it turned out well.  Everyone was smiling and excited about the image transferring to their t-shirts! Who can blame them? It is kind of magical!

We were especially impressed with how respectful everyone was to all the folks in the building that night for holiday parties and events. Overall it was an exciting, messy, inspiring night!