Parastoo Ahovan and her work. Photo contributed by ECoCA.
Across two canvases, Aura Wang’s painted knight and dragon were in a tense balance, eyeing each other through a thick spill of color, swirls of blue and red everywhere. The knight was purposefully androgynous, with long, flowing hair, a strong jawline, and shining gold armor. The dragon flowed like a river, taking up almost the entire canvas.
Wang’s oil painting, The Tale of Knight I, is part of the work that the Ely Center of Contemporary Art (ECoCA) is doing to amplify early- and mid-career artists in and beyond New Haven, even as the organization looks for a new home. From March through June, Wang joined artists Parastoo Ahovan and Ciara Curwen for the center’s spring 2026 Keyhole Artists’ Residency, a period of work that culminated in three different solo exhibitions this summer.
All of them are now using what they’ve learned to continue branching out into New Haven and Connecticut.
ECoCA currently rents from CitySeed, a food justice engine and small business incubator located at 162 James St. in the city’s Fair Haven neighborhood. That lease ends sometime between December of this year and next March, said curator and gallery director Aimée Burg. The organization does not yet have a permanent new home, she added, although it has made progress toward a new space.
“The residency is my favorite part [of this work],” Burg said. “I get to know all the artists individually, and get to follow their process from the very beginning.”
At the end of the spring Keyhole Residency late last month, that was on full display as ECoCA staff, board, and supporters came out and bid the artists adieu. Throughout, attendees celebrated the Keyhole artists, as part of an up-and-coming generation of arts practitioners in the city.
Looking around during the reception, it was easy to see why. Each of the artists has a unique style to their art, and each somehow managed to speak to the others through substrate and medium. Displayed together in the space—a wide, open former factory building that ECoCA has transformed into a gallery—the works seemed to chatter across the walls, in a kind of artistic cross-talk that flowed in and out of several other exhibitions also on display.
Wang, for instance, worked with oil on canvas during the residency, with a richness and fantastical approach to her paintings that helps pull a person in. All of her pieces have figures in them—often but not always supernatural or heroic—twisted into odd angles and colored with reds and blues.
One, titled Mermaid, Ghost, and Demon, depicts three faces, each rendered in one of the primary colors. From the upper lefthand corner, a marbled white-and-yellow face gazes down, eyes closed, shoulders tilted forward. She looks sad, or maybe pensive, lips pursed in deep thought. Two figures fill the space below, and a pinprick of a blood-red moon appears on the horizon line above.
Beneath the yellow face, a red figure—presumably the demon—looks up, the thick spiral of a brain floating inside a glowing, ruby red skull. The creature’s mouth hangs open, in either a scream or a smile. Beside it, a powder-blue face is much smaller, almost as if it is shrunken, hands reaching out and ensconced in what appear to be wings.
Wang said her inspiration for her recent works, completed during the residency, was taking many common parts of popular mythologies, and mixing them into a “new fantasy world.” In her painting with the knight and dragon, for instance, she talked about wanting the two to be in a precarious balance between binaries. Or in her words, “the gray areas between norms.”
Ahovan, meanwhile, started her artistic journey as a sculptor, but quickly realized she wanted to experiment with three-dimensional pieces on a canvas. Iranian by birth, she identifies strongly with the popular Persian rugs that come out of the country’s long history, and the tradition of weaving one’s story into them (her pieces create an interesting conversation with the work of artist Mahsa Attiran, who exhibited at both Cheshire’s Ball & Socket Arts and ECoCA earlier this year).
When Ahovan began her residency work, it seemed that the only option was to unthread the canvases, and enter a long dialogue around making, unmaking, storytelling, and history. Her process is a wholly unique one: she paints the back of a given canvas, and then slowly unthreads the front of it into her desired shape.
“It’s like beautiful destruction,” she said.
This process is apparent in Harmony in Contrast, a two-canvas piece with triangles on both sides. The back of the canvases are a sage green, and have been carefully and painstakingly unwoven into a piece that sways slightly every time a person walks by. The edges of the vertical strands are frayed and hang down in undulating strings, yet where the canvas meets the horizontal, hanging strands, the line is sharp and clean.
The visual shapes bring together materiality, craft, and the artist’s own emotion, exploring the idea of individual threads becoming a whole.
Another of Ahovan’s pieces is Rebuilt, which was made in a similar fashion to Harmony in Contrast. However, after taking apart the weave of the canvas, Ahovan reassembled the strings to form a circle. As passersby stopped to look at it last month, the piece seemed to symbolize renewal, and the constant re-making of oneself through weaving and pattern.
This spring, Ahovan also worked with oils on canvas to create portraits; those were not on display.
Curwen and her work. Photo contributed by ECoCA.
Curwen worked almost exclusively out of a single notebook. The notebook was made of two different kinds of paper, and she worked with pencil, pen, and watercolor. When it came to the question of display, Curwen said she wanted to create the illusion of one big piece, while still maintaining the individuality of each piece of notebook paper.
“It’s so relaxing and repetitive. I also love how the materials are things you can bring with you everywhere,” she said.
The final piece, Cluster, was displayed as a single line snaking across an otherwise blank room. Each piece of paper contained a different drawing and idea; these were arranged in a row across the middle of the space. Some sheets had only a few pencil lines, some were half finished, and yet others had clearly been reworked many times.
Featuring a range of materials–watercolor, ink, graphite, colored pencils, silkscreen inks, silver-leaf, dye, oil and varnish–these images explore a range of moods, figures, and objects.
Learn more about exhibitions at ECoCA here. This article comes from the ninth cohort of the Arts Council's Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI). Zahara (Zazie) Gazzola is a sophomore at Wilbur Cross High School and the ACES Educational Center for the Arts. Read more articles by our wonderful youth arts journalists here!