Another Spring Exhibition Down!

          This project was all about identifying community impact makers! We did this by exploring our driving question. “What makes a community impact maker?” We started exploring this question by identifying what a Crazy One is. “Crazy Ones” as called by Steve Jobs in his “Think Different” Apple commercial in the early 2000s, are people who went against societal constructs. Someone who goes against the mainstream narrative fighting to make change and make the world a better place. 

          After defining what a Crazy One is, we discussed who else can be considered a Crazy One. We watched 3 consecutive movies, Hidden Figures, Amadeus, Gandhi. After each movie, we held a socratic seminar to further analyze the movie and how each main character(s) are considered Crazy Ones. The socratic seminars I completed this semester are comparable to my seminars last semester. I feel they were greatly improved and I came more prepared. We all took notes and after each and every class I went home and revised my notes. This allowed me to narrow down which notes were most important and how I could use them to my advantage in my socratic seminars.

          After this, we moved on to our individual aspect of the project preparing for the exhibition. Each person chose someone who positively impacted their community and moved society forward for everybody. We were told we would be personally interviewing them and inviting them to the exhibition.

          I chose Ray Cairney. Ray Cairney belongs to my Seycove Secondary community. Ray was the custodian of 13 years here at Seycove. I was always astounded how much impact Ray had on us. Ray was extremely selfless and would always go out of his way to help us with our problems. Ray’s impact was so widespread that random people I had never even seen before were astounded that I chose Ray during the exhibition.

To present our community impact maker to the exhibition, we were tasked with making a portrait. We had free reign with the portrait except that “the main focus of the creation must be the face” hence the definition of a portrait. Initially I was stuck, I had some pretty simple ideas but thought they were too basic. Then it hit me. Ray’s impact was way too widespread for me to just represent his impact on myself! So, I called upon my knowledge of conceptual art from last semester and made a conceptual portrait. I decided to build Ray’s face with different words people have used about him. If you knew Ray, you were welcome to add your own adjective or phrase to help build Ray. This allowed me to represent his widespread impact to everybody with a portrait of Ray being drawn single handedly by words.

          After completing our portraits, we set up our exhibition. We divided the class into different categories based on which community their members impacted. Environnemental, Business, Arts, Athletics, and Service. My project about Ray Cairney fell under service, as Ray was our custodian. We Sectioned off with the band curtains and began preparing. We set up our service section based around acts of service. We had a positivity board that allowed people to share their positive thoughts, we had Purposeful Popcorn, Lemon-aid, and even Caring Cookies. We set our food table in the middle of our exhibit so after visiting all our projects people could grab a treat on the way out. 

          All in all, I believe this exhibition was a huge success. I was able to creep out of my comfort zone and take a risk with my final product. I was able to build off of my failures in the last semester and turn them into successes. I put a lot of time and effort into choosing my community impact maker to solidify my contracted grade and go above and beyond.