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Alicia LaChance’s ‘Vanishing Point’ on view in the Contemporary Gallery
Alicia LaChance is a painter and multidisciplinary artist who has shown her work nationally and internationally, ranging from gallery shows to large-scale public commissions. Regardless of the medium, LaChance’s work always revolves around different ways to complicate and expand the flat, two-dimensional picture plane while exploring issues of pattern, repetition, and oblique beauty.
With her exhibition Vanishing Point, LaChance adds to her repertoire of artistic concerns an exploration of transparency, layering, and fragility. With these artworks the images become less about boldness of color and intensity of pattern, and more about subtlety and the slow reveal. Shapes emerge not only from an application of pigment, but from small gestures and layerings of form.
The exhibition 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 a reception at the University Gallery on Feb. 6 from 5-7 p.m. A gallery talk will begin at 5:15.
“I have wanted to feature Alicia’s work for years,” says Gallery Director Jason Hoelscher. “Having seen her paintings and prints for years now in gallery shows and during the art fairs in Miami every year, I’ve enjoyed seeing how her visual vocabulary grows and changes over time. I am excited to bring this important artist’s work to Georgia Southern, and to introduce her to our students and to what we’re doing here in the Betty Foy Sanders Department of Art.”
Widow Maker Collective’s ‘Bedtime Stories’ on view in the Contemporary Gallery
Artist talk and reception set for Jan. 16
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.”
‘All Things at Once’ visiting artist exhibition opens on Statesboro Campus
“All Things at Once,” a visiting artist exhibition by Dan Funderburgh is on view at Georgia Southern University’s Center for Art and Theatre on the Statesboro Campus. Funderburgh is a Brooklyn-based illustrator, artist and hand-screened wallpaper designer whose work explores the density of communication with logos, graphics and pattern density. The exhibition will run through Dec. 6. There will be an artist talk on Nov. 12 beginning at 5 p.m. in the Arts Building followed by a reception in the Center for Art and Theatre’s University Gallery from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
“Funderburgh’s exhibition is a definite do-not-miss exhibition this season,” says Jason Hoelscher, gallery director in the Betty Foy Sanders Department of Art. “The works are a perfect combination of layered and dense, as well as eye-catching and thought-provoking. His work offers something for everyone, whether some optical leisure time well spent taking in the gorgeous visual textures and colors, or something more thought intensive like zooming in and bracing oneself against wave after wave of visual intensity.”
Funderburgh’s work has been shown at the Museum of Art and Design in New York, and his clients have included Nike, The New York Times, Cole Haan and more.
For more information on the exhibition on the Statesboro Campus, visit https://calendar.georgiasouthern.edu/event/exhibition_dan_funderburgh#.XbHRS-dKi3c
Georgia Southern University, a public Carnegie Doctoral/R2 institution founded in 1906, offers 141 degree programs serving more than 26,000 students through nine colleges on three campuses in Statesboro, Savannah, Hinesville and online instruction. A leader in higher education in southeast Georgia, the University provides a diverse student population with expert faculty, world-class scholarship and hands-on learning opportunities. Georgia Southern creates lifelong learners who serve as responsible scholars, leaders and stewards in their communities. Visit GeorgiaSouthern.edu.
Interdisciplinary artist Raheleh Filsoofi visits Georgia Southern; exhibition opens Oct. 21 in Statesboro
Combining ancient and cutting-edge technologies, ranging from ceramics and poetry to computation and ambient sound installations, interdisciplinary and post-location artist Raheleh Filsoofi will share a mix of artworks that explore the personal and political, the local and the global, in her upcoming exhibition at the Center for Art & Theatre on Georgia Southern’s Statesboro Campus. “Overview Effect” will be on view from Oct. 21 through Dec. 6 in the Contemporary Gallery. An opening reception and artist talk is set for Oct. 21 from 5-7:30 p.m.
Raheleh Filsoofi works around the world while bringing a diversity of viewpoints and approaches down into a personal perspective. “I have been looking forward to Filsoofi’s exhibition for some time now,” says BFSDoArt Gallery Director Jason Hoelscher. “Her work brings together a range of ideas and approaches and technologies that yield a complex mesh that’s very of-the-moment, like a microcosm of the many voices and viewpoints that come together to form culture in the first place.”
The exhibition title “Overview Effect” comes from author Frank White’s book about astronauts’ experience of seeing Earth in its fullness. As White describes, “the ‘overview effect,’ characterizes the way in which political borders and other boundaries that are so obvious on earth seem insignificant, if not imperceptible at a distance, and the environment that unites all creatures on earth is a capsule of precious resources that enable all to survive. The imperative of that interdependence should alert us to moments of miscommunication, mistrust, and the conflict that consume the time and space of our political and social lives close up and at a distance,” Filsoofi said. “The work in this show exposes the nature (and absurdity) of social and personal awareness—the awareness of self and awareness of others—in the environment of international politics that filters human interaction around the world.”
Filsoofi will give an artist talk Monday, Oct. 21, at 5 p.m. in Arts Building, room 2071. A reception will follow at the Center for Art and Theatre from 6-7:30 p.m.
Filsoofi’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. For more information, visit https://www.rahelehfilsoofi.com/.
‘BFA 2019: Senior Exhibition’ on view at Center for Art & Theatre
The Georgia Southern University Betty Foy Sanders Department of Art (BFSDoArt) will present the “BFA 2019 Senior Exhibition” May 6- May 10 at the Center for Art & Theatre’s University and Contemporary Galleries on the Statesboro Campus. The reception will be held May 10 from 5 to 7 p.m. Light refreshments will be served, and the public is invited to attend.
The Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the BFSDoArt is comprised of a dynamic and multi-faceted curriculum that is led by exceptional faculty. Every year, the Department graduates many gifted and diverse undergraduate students that go on to successful careers in a variety of professions. This exhibition is a cohesive record of the ideas and images that each student has investigated throughout the last semester of their academic pursuits.
The exhibition will showcase the portfolios and capstone projects of Bachelor of Fine Arts graduating seniors in a variety of media including ceramics, digital and traditional painting, mixed media, photography, printmaking, sculpture and video.
“In recent decades the art world has expanded to incorporate a wide range of ideas and disciplines,” says gallery director Jason Hoelscher. “This expansion of potentials and mediums is definitely on display with this group of emerging artists, who have created an exhibition teeming with creativity manifest in forms ranging from ceramics, installation and painting to powerful political points, sequential narratives, game design and more.”
Students with work featured in this exhibition include Marjorie Adams, AJ Aremu, Charlynne Crutcher, Allison Exley, Taylor Goody, Shelby Head, Abigail Newman, Alyssa Santana, Raven Waters, and Krisann Wellington.