Dario Mohr, Aimée Burg, Lauren Flaaen, and Diana Abouchacra. Jarelis Calderon Photos.
Inside the Ely Center of Contemporary Art’s (ECoCA) bright exhibition spaces, three emerging artists are transforming blank walls into the beginnings of their next big works. Through the Keyhole Workspace Residency, they’ve been given free studio space for the semester to develop their creative visions. Now, they are in the midst of experimenting, creating, and preparing for an upcoming exhibition that will showcase the results.
The residency is part of the Ely Center’s effort to nurture local talent by offering artists the time, space, and support to focus fully on their craft. Each semester, the program selects a small group of artists whose work reflects diverse perspectives and practices, giving them a platform to grow their ideas and connect with the local creative community.
Aimée Burg, gallery director at the Ely Center, has spent the past two years helping artists find space, support, and opportunities to grow. For her, it’s a chance to create social connectedness in the city.
“They become their own tiny community in our building.” she said. “They react to each other, talk to each other, and have conversations that probably wouldn’t happen anywhere else.” she said.
Diana Abouchacra is an emerging artist whose work explores human connection and belonging. In her earlier projects, she focused on othering—how groups and individuals can feel disconnected or separate. But in her current work, she is turning her attention to the ways people come together, form bonds, and create shared spaces.
Abouchacra’s current project began with something deeply personal—the passing of her mother, Amal, ten years ago and the belongings she left behind. Among her mother’s belongings was a bag of bag ties. What started as an experiment—twisting and wrapping the bag ties around wooden dowels, evolved into an exploration of connection.
As Abouchacra began collecting bag ties from others, her creations became symbolic of people holding hands, reaching toward one another. It was fundamentally hopeful, all the more meaningful because “Amal” means hope in Arabic.
Abouchacra began her artistic journey in printmaking, but has since shifted her focus from illustration and the human form to exploring the material qualities of objects. She calls her suspended sculptures “humanistic creatures” because they hang freely, moving only with gravity. While she’s usually worked in muted tones, she’s now experimenting with color, using it as an additional layer of emotional expression to her work.
For her upcoming exhibition, Abouchacra doesn’t want to tell viewers what to think, she added. Instead, she hopes to build an immersive space where they can pause, use their senses, and simply be present.
“So maybe just for a moment they can experience this constructive world just while they're in the exhibition just to maybe forget a little bit about their problems of the day and just experience this with all their senses and to be present,” she said.
For artist Dario Mohr, the Keyhole Workspace Residency marks both a return and a renewal. Mohr's new 12-piece series, Black Archetypes, revisits the Jungian Archetypes he explored years ago, but this time from a more personal place. Each painting depicts someone he’s known over the past decade, specifically Black individuals whose personalities reflect the many sides of these archetypal figures.
Much of Mohr's practice draws on ancestry and spirituality. After tracing his heritage through multiple DNA tests, including African ancestry in 2022, he discovered his tribal origins (“I am Akan on my mother’s maternal side Ga-Adangbe on my mother’s paternal side,” he explained in a follow-up email). That information continues to shape how he approaches his work, which often touches on ancestor reverence and African spiritual traditions.
“Discovering this was a huge triumph for me and set me on a path towards reclamation of lost ancestry,” he wrote in the same follow-up email.
Beyond his own practice, Mohr founded AnkhLave Arts Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing contemporary artists, particularly artists of color, by providing a platform for showcasing their work and exchanging ideas. He also recently curated Echoes of Home, an international exhibition in Kenya, which featured 32 Black artists, many of whom exhibited in Africa for the first time.
“I hope viewers see themselves reflected in the work,” he said. “We all come from the same source, this is about exploring the constellation of what it means to be human.”
Artist Lauren Flaaen, meanwhile, is exploring transformation through her experimental work with repurposed upholstery. Flaaen takes discarded furniture and turns it into repeated, human-like forms, seeing a chair or sofa as “a thing that holds a body, like a place you go when you need comfort,” she said. In her hands, the fabric becomes almost like skin, carrying the history of the material while taking on new life.
Flaaen’s work balances decay and growth. By pushing materials to their limits and reshaping them, she highlights how destruction can create space for something new. She also works with metal, thinking about the physical labor it takes to shape heavy materials and how that effort connects to the meaning of the piece.
At the Ely Center, Flaaen is exploring these ideas in a space that supports experimentation and focus. She’s using the residency to test new forms and push her materials in ways she couldn’t before, finding the freedom to really explore and learn from the process. She added that it meant a lot to be in a space that cares about the community.
“I think we’re always transforming and growing and, as an artist I think that’s the point of being an artist is to keep changing and growing and connecting with what it is that drives your practice.” she said.
A sculptor herself, Burg was drawn to artists who work at a large scale and push materials in new ways. She loves how each artist brings something unique to the residency— Aboucharas’ installations and video work, Flaaen’s large fabric sculptures, and Mohr’s paintings exploring social themes. Beyond providing studio space, the residency connects artists with curators and critics to help them refine their practice and realize their vision.
Looking ahead, Burg is excited about the residency’s move to a new location at CitySeed. She hopes to continue growing the program, welcome more artists, and create new ways for their work to interact with the space.
“The goal is really about bringing this place to life, it’s amazing to see these artists work, learn from each other, and be part of a community that supports contemporary art in New Haven.”
As residency artists opened their spaces last weekend, viewers echoed that feeling. John Arabolos, a professor at the University of New Haven, has been a part of the local art scene for decades. He teaches in the university’s interior design program and has exhibited widely, including multiple times at the Ely Center.
During the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, Arabolos created an installation reflecting isolation, collecting shards from his fireplace over several months and arranging them in a spiral pattern to represent the passage of time.
Visiting ECoCA earlier this week, Arabolos was drawn to a three-dimensional pink ceramic sculpture with undulating curves.
“It looks amorphic, like it’s alive,” he said, “It feels like there's a life to it, and it makes you see things in a new way.”
For Arabolos, spaces like the Ely Center are essential to the local arts community.
“I want to see this place succeed,” he said. “It represents the state of the arts now, and it’s important for the public to be aware, participate, and support.”
A junior at Wilbur Cross High School, Jarelis Calderon is an alumna of the 2025 summer cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI). YAJI is a program in which New Haven, Hamden and West Haven Public Schools high school students pitch, write, edit and publish articles through the Arts Paper. This year, YAJI advisors included Arts Paper Editor Lucy Gellman and reporter and YAJI alum Abiba Biao.