ARTS Southeast is pleased to present Sing the Body Electric, a Duo Exhibition of new works by Jon Witzky and Ivy Anderson, on display at the Thompson Savannah through January 31, 2025. View a complete list of works on display below.

About Jon Witzky

Jon Witzky is an artist, arts educator and independent curator. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, Jon now calls Savannah home. He received his BFA in Painting from Ohio State University and an MFA in Painting from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Jon is the Program Director at ARTS Southeast, and Co-Founder/Editor of IMPACT Arts + Culture Magazine. 

The origins of Jon’s work in this series relate to paintings, drawings and ideas spanning the past twenty years, with shapes, lines and themes that continually re-emerge. Created in just under three months, the paintings in Sing the Body Electric have a freshness and vitality to them that communicate an honest exploration and a departure from his earlier dark color palette. These works aren’t strictly bound by abstraction, figuration or landscape, but hover between these ideas –  a concept Witzky describes as between dog and wolf – between the feral and the civilized. 

About Ivy Anderson

Ivy Anderson is a fiber artist from Spring Lake, Michigan with a Master of Fine Arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design. With a background in fashion design, she received her Bachelor of Arts from Indiana University, Bloomington with a concentration in wearable sculpture. Ivy specializes in machine knitting with her current body of work investigating abstraction and form through the use of discarded objects. In December 2023, she traveled to Japan to research traditional fiber processes in Kyoto, Osaka, Tokyo, and Shikoku Island. Ivy’s first solo exhibition, Somewhere Between Something and Nothing took place in May 2024, and this body of work received the Red Dot International Design Concept Award. Ivy recently returned from an artist residency with the Grand Rapids Children’s Museum in Michigan where she taught workshops related to fibers and sculpture. Her work was also on view in Grand Rapids for ArtPrize 2024. Moving forward, Ivy is a Supper at Sea 2024 – 2025 Fellow for the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum in Savannah, and she will also be developing an artist residency program in collaboration with non-profit organization Re:Purpose Savannah. 

There is a certain absurdity to using objects as a raw sculptural medium; taking the discarded and tending to it with the same regard as any other fine art material. These Bicolor Assemblages contain frameworks of found objects, pieced together with the intention to emphasize the unique architecture of familiar structures, while concealing their original function. Encased within layers of knitted elastic, the textile acts as a skin of distortion. The gridlike structure of the knit maps a colorful topographic surface, emphasizing the simultaneous visual and physical tension. The bicolor combinations are in constant dialogue, shifting and vibrating with perspective, further abstracting the frameworks within. This transformation allows discardable stuff to invent a new identity, existing as something else entirely, something alive, bodily, breathing.