March break was extraordinary this year from the standpoint of eight grade 11/12 students from across Vancouver. The GO8 group met at the newly formed Satellite Gallery, a new urban art gallery for special projects shared between the Museum of Anthropology, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (both at UBC) and Presentation House Gallery.

GO8 is an internship/program designed to inspire, engage and excite youth to become immersed in Vancouver's contemporary art world, to work collaboratively, and to create a public art intervention with the group. Over the course of five full days at the gallery, the GO8 group participated in visits to the Contemporary Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Rennie Collection, as well as taking a tour by text message of the Downtown Eastside from the Miss Guides collective and a life drawing class at BLIM. The focus at each of these places was to develop an awareness of performance art work in context.

Throughout these exciting tours, the group attended seminars on contemporary art and interventions from university graduates and ongoing group planning sessions to establish their own collaborative art piece that would live in the public domain for a short period of time. As students Angela Yang (David Thompson) and Joke Werner (Lord Byng) wrote about their final project, "Our idea was to take pictures of people and show what they like about themselves. It proved to be a difficult question to respond to, and the answers we received were surprisingly varied"�After everything started to come together, we all felt a sense of accomplishment-a real job, well done. We were a group of super hyped-up kids filled with new ideas and ready to go out into the world to experience new forms of art."

To read more about their experience visit the gallery's blog at: http://satellitegallery.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/what-we-did-in-spring-break/

2011 Participating students came from:

Lord Byng Secondary School
Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School
Ideal Mini School
David Thompson Secondary School
Sir Charles Tupper Secondary School
Vancouver Technical Secondary School
Point Grey Secondary School
Prince of Wales Secondary School

Here are some other images captured during the experience:

If you would like to receive email updates about this free March break internship and program that can be applied a students work experience and to share this program with your students next year, please email Satellite Gallery at info@satellitegallery.ca