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Widow Maker Collective’s ‘Bedtime Stories’ on view in the Contemporary Gallery

Artist talk and reception set for Jan. 16

Widow Maker Collective is a Savannah-based collective of artists. They have shown their work nationally and internationally, from small-scale galleries to vast events involving tens of thousands of viewers.

The Widow Maker Collective is a Savannah, Georgia-based collective of artists whose work incorporates and entangles everything from painting and illustration to multimedia and new media extravaganzas. They have shown their work nationally and internationally, from small-scale galleries to vast events involving tens of thousands of viewers.

Their exhibition, “Bedtime Stories” will be on view at Georgia Southern University’s Center for Art and Theatre on the Statesboro Campus from Jan. 13 to Feb. 7. There will be an artist talk on January 16 beginning at 5 p.m. in Arts Building room 2071 followed by a reception in the Center for Art and Theatre’s Contemporary Gallery from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

 The Widow Maker Collective–the name is derived from a particularly scary and rickety studio space the artists shared upon finishing graduate school–comprises three artists: Will Penny, Michael Porten and Britt Spencer. Penny’s work combines the material and the digital with the fine arts and design, to explore the role of material and spatial objects in an increasingly virtual culture. Porten’s work is an exploration of meaning-making that combines seriousness and spectacle, yielding works that are not only eye-popping in visual intensity, but also laden with deeper significance. Spencer’s work is highly illustrative in appearance, and uses a range of traditional and cutting-edge means to fuse the static and the imagistic with the narrative and the deeply symbolic. The individual artists’ highlights include permanent art installations in the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home to the Atlanta Falcons (Penny and Porten), and cover artwork for such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and Newsweek (Spencer). Group highlights include their Pollinate installation at the HUBweek art/technology festival in Boston, which not only drew over 50,000 visitors but was also deemed one of Boston’s “most Instagrammable locations” for that week.

“The Widow Maker Collective is among the most dynamic and exciting groups of artists not only in the southeast, but along the east coast in general,” said Gallery Director Jason Hoelscher. “I’ve worked with all three artists individually and as a group on-and-off for years now, and their ability to transform any idea or material, from the unusual to the mundane, never ceases to amaze me. Their show Bedtime Stories is sure to be one of the state’s must-see exhibitions for 2020.”

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