Speculative Structures features the work of Eliza Bentz, Maggie Evans, Jennifer Moss, Sharon Norwood, and Joanna Paige Silver, on display in The Ellis Gallery at ARTS Southeast.
On display: November 7 – December 13, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, November 7, 5 - 9PM
Closing Reception: Friday, December 5, 5 - 9PM
About the Exhibition
Speculative Structures brings together five artists whose works probe how systems — social, material, linguistic, and psychological — shape human experience. Each artist reconfigures structure as an active field rather than a fixed frame, revealing how repetition, pattern, and gesture can both uphold and dismantle the orders we inhabit.
Sharon Norwood’s installation reflects on how the histories of Black labor and identity linger within Savannah’s foundations. Through repetition and transformation, she turns inherited forms into quiet acts of resistance.
Rooted in her ongoing exploration of ornament and gesture, the work considers beauty as both burden and possibility. In reworking what was built through bondage, Norwood transforms labor into authorship; an offering of remembrance, care, and power reclaimed.
Joanna Paige Silver’s process of photographing, cutting, and reassembling images transforms the domestic surface into a terrain of memory. Silver’s vivid colors and fragmented compositions evoke nostalgia as architecture — how the spaces we inhabit hold emotional residue, and how recollection reconstructs the past from what remains.
Maggie Evans examines the pull between individuality and conformity, using uniform imagery to visualize the collective impulses that govern behavior. Her paintings of identical chairs and repeating architectural forms expose the fine line between organization and erasure, between the comfort of belonging and the loss of self.
Jennifer Moss examines structure through natural systems, drawing on the recursive patterns of growth, decay, and regeneration. Her fiber works, at once precise and organic, blur distinctions between control and chaos. By fracturing familiar patterns, she reveals the instability within the natural order and our desire to make meaning from it.
Eliza Bentz explores the intersection of craft, language, and computation through her series Both / And, a set of woven diptychs functioning as textile tablets encoded with linguistic data. Each pair contains an antonymic set embedded within pixel-like black-and-white patterns derived from binary code — translating the zeros and ones of digital systems into the overs and unders of woven structure. By positioning weaving as the original binary technology, Bentz frames the loom as a site of both history and speculation: a place where opposing truths can coexist, and where touch becomes a form of encoded thinking.
Together, these artists explore structure as a speculative condition — a framework continually rewritten through use, memory, and resistance. Speculative Structures positions material, labor, and form as active participants in a shared inquiry into how systems endure, adapt, and ultimately transform.
