MUSCLE
Closing Reception: July 18
The Ely Center of Contemporary Art is proud to present MUSCLE, curated by JLS Gangwisch.
To celebrate Pride 2025 the Ely Center for Contemporary Arts and the New Haven Pride Center partner to launch MUSCLE, an intermedia exhibition of artworks by local and regional artists featuring the vitality of the LGBTQIA+ community.
These works articulate social power. They are evidence of both personal and collective gains made through determination, will, and grit. They remind us of voluminous resistance to adversity alongside the constant, quiet, domestic assertion of an authentic life. They illustrate the transmutability of our bodies and our bodies politic. They demonstrate lives lived openly, freely, and truthfully. They are tinged with past violences and future threats. They demonstrate the diversity of our community while speaking to our solidarity, our shared vision, and our united desires. They invite us to play with each other, to work together.
2025 is a year that demands muscle. This moment calls us to exercise our authenticity, flex our coordinated joy, and balance the tension of being too seen with the bravery of allowing ourselves to be seen. Pride celebrations were born out of resistance; through resistance we build and exhibit MUSCLE, our powerful creative strength.
-JLS Gangwisch
Featuring the work of Joseph Annino, Kelsey Archbold, Finley Doyle, Ana Maria Farina, Diego Horisberger, David Kuehler, Kayce Lewandowski, Caroline McAuliffe, Michael Morgan, Cate Solari, Matthew Towers and Yves François Wilson
MUSCLE is an in person exhibition celebrating Pride located at the New Haven Pride Center, 50 Orange Street, New Haven. MUSCLE has a soft opening this Friday, June 20, and a closing reception July 18th! The Pride Center’s hours are Mon-Fri 10am-5pm.
FLEX:// is the sister exhibition of MUSCLE and is the first exhibition in a relaunch of Digital Grace, the Ely Center’s online exhibition space, now with an instagram account that will feature interviews with the artists! The interviews will be released throughout the run of the exhibition. Follow the new Instagram account HERE.
Joseph Annino These works explore personal feelings of grappling with knowing myself and feelings of isolation or concealment. Both works are inspired by music, “Nessun Dorma” by the aria of the same name from the opera Turandot by Puccini, and “Ghosts and Goblins Walk in This Land” by the song “22nd Century” written by Exuma and performed by Nina Simone. These are songs about what is secret and what is revealed, morphing identities, and the danger and hope the future holds. Both works are self portraits, nude in wanting to be my true self, yet obscured, as that always comes at the risk of how others might react.
Kelsey Archbold My oil paintings explores the way society presses a duality upon femininity that mischaracterizes the femme experience as a way of control, and how women can push back against this. Through visual narrative and symbolic imagery, I explore how women confront and resist these limiting constructs. The Visitor shows a solitary woman in her home accompanied by her orange cats. She is nude, but it is unclear if it is for her own pleasure or the viewers. Shown outside, camouflaged, lurks a tiger. Has the woman seen the tiger? Is she aware of its presence? The tiger could be a threat, but perhaps instead it is aspirational. Cats are considered semi-domesticated, they never severed the tie between them and their wild cousins. In What You Think of Me, I address the tendency to project assumptions onto women based solely on their presence. The figure appears neutral, almost passive, yet her exposed breast and the brooding clouds behind her evoke conflicting narratives: is she sexual, maternal, melancholic, defiant? When a woman refuses to perform emotional labor for the comfort of others, she is often met with disdain. The painting asks: how exhausting must it be to avoid even a "resting bitch face"? My paintings follow the tradition of portraiture and surrealism, often combining degrees of representation, from realism to flat cartoons to simple line drawings, all in one painting. As this body of work evolves, the women within it increasingly defy the reductive narratives projected onto them, stepping beyond the binary expectations that attempt to define them.
Finley Doyle The radiator is part of a hidden system. It’s the capillaries of the building. It maintains the distinction between the inside and outside worlds. It does this too well, and then we open the window. We let the outside in and the inside out. Now we can smell the garbage and hear the neighbors screaming. It is intentionally inefficient. It loses heat. It forces our hand. I’m interested in the seemingly uninteresting object. I’m interested in the surface and the exciting moments in the paint itself. I like to create work around a domestic object that doesn’t hint at a narrative. I paint my partner and the space we share. I paint the radiator, the bed, the kitchen counter. My duty to the subject and the surface are similar: to neither show nor obscure too much, to revel in the wetness and bodily pleasure of paint while paying attention to the real.
Ana Maria Farina A loop of yarn makes a dot, the start of everything. I instinctively choose colors and gestures that along with intricate, sculpted surfaces evolve into imagery. Using a tufting gun along with needles and hooks, I conjure vibrant objects of comfort in wool that inhabit a mystical pictorial space between abstraction and representation, where painting, sculpture, and textile meet. I am attracted by the creature-like, mythological parts of being human and the untamed primordial wilderness we are taught to suppress. Each piece is a tactile exploration of the hidden, the intangible, and the mythic, inviting viewers to connect with both the familiar and the mysterious. Agnès Varda said that if we opened people up, we’d find landscapes, and I’m fascinated by the idea of what these landscapes look like. Growing up, my father always said that in order to turn a house into a home, you need to have rugs. Working in fibers allows me to bring this sense of comfort and honor my ancestry of Brazilian craftswomen while I work on themes of psychoanalysis and our internal battles of constraintment, repression, and release. Through texture, form, and color, I bring forth a world that is at once comforting and unfamiliar, where the lines between the physical and psychological are softly blurred.
Diego Horisberger Diego Horisberger is a mixed-media artist focused on personal experience in relation to questions of identities and communities that they have affinities for and inhabit. Through print, paint and photographs, Diego embraces the tensioned state of queerness as it relates to a resistance of categorization. This practice also allows them to process their surroundings, and helps them arrive at a way of self-knowing.
David Kuehler I draw upon my experiences in stage and film to explore themes of social status, remembrance and materiality. My works are suffused in my memory influenced, also, by artifice and nostalgia. They are often narrative and sometimes emotional, inarticulate responses. Safflower oil, water and varnishes, combined with thinned oil paint disrupt character forms and create unexpected color dialogues. The buildup of large shapes and patterns makes way for unexpected relationships between color, line, and textures. Rather than asking viewers to suspend disbelief, I invite them to see the world as it truly is—layered and constructed. I am currently investigating gender disposition posited as truth in 20th century American cinema. Iconic characters, especially in Western movies, often present the masculine ideal through functions of dominance—intentionally suppressing traits, such as vulnerability, empathy and intimacy. Using mid-century film production stills as inspiration, I am painting into "the illusion of cinema" as part of a personal journey to unearth, and reimagine, myths of masculinity. The idea for the painting "Elegy" emerged while I was researching how director John Ford shaped John Wayne into an icon of American masculinity. I came across a production still from the film, "The Searchers" showing a crew member carrying Wayne’s stuffed horse onto set, while Wayne gazes stoically into the sunset. This image prompted me to ask: How might I disrupt the status of these figures and reimagine a new narrative?
Kayce Lewandowski My current body of work presents ideas that aren’t always spoken about based on my own personal experiences. My work reveals a great amount of my identity, some I’m proud of and some not so much, but neither are matters I talk about regularly. The ideas I’ve expressed through my work share the common theme of hiding. I’ve hid my eating disorder and my sexuality from others in the past, sometimes intentionally but often instinctually. Dealing with anorexia and anxiety brings a lot of shame and insecurity which caused me to keep it to myself, however all the physical signs became very obvious. For me, it felt like I had lost control over myself. My works accentuate these physicalities to an extreme level to depict how I and others may have felt physically and mentally through this challenge. Besides portraying anorexia, my work also interacts with the insecurities of my own sexuality as a lesbian. I have grown to own and love this piece of my identity rather than hide it, however the reason I hid it for so long constitutes reflection not only on a personal level, but on a societal level. Our nation has come so far in accepting LGBTQ+ individuals, but it's clear that the fight for respect and rights as a minority needs to be spoken out about more than ever. I believe it is important to educate and inform, and I am willing to incorporate my vulnerability in my work because my art feels like an extension of myself and a message to those around. My process is cathartic by helping me make sense of my reality, which is unavoidable in visual, tangible form. One may think that painting about the negative aspects of one’s life would be painful, but I feel it helps me communicate these issues with others in an impactful way. This is especially important to me when others who relate feel they are being seen, or when I can share my perspective with those who don’t initially empathize with my concepts.
Caroline McAuliffe My work is a performance of identities, and in this current era, many former selves are now in the shadows of this bigger identity that has muscled in—mother. Mothering has pushed me to expose more of myself: the insecurities, the monotony, the duality of living and making art from home with my wife and child, and even the toys that surround us have become the subject matter of recent photos and sculptures. Objects of Play is based on how I engage with the “stuffness” of toddlerhood. It feels pressing to speak honestly and not tie a pretty bow on it. Caregiving is demanding, neverending work. The physical and emotional demands of parenting a toddler have turned our world into the subject of my art. I am exploring the body, our lived spaces and the objects of my toddler’s obsessions that fill our home. I am consumed by labor, by stuff and left to grapple with matrescence through humor and art.
Michael Morgan Lightning should obey physics: the tallest metal object wins. Yet in this canvas the bolt veers past a metal sword high in the sky and strikes a lone dog-walker instead. One of the dogs drops theatrically in a “play-dead” flop; the other turns to flee, muzzle twisted with concern. Better to Have More Lightning in the Hand is the second panel in an ongoing triptych that includes Red at Morning. In that first work, a bronze figure stands on a plinth carved “CDIV.” These roman numerals equate to 404, a jest that the monument is dedicated to nothingness. The series is less about what monuments depict than about the raw power claimed simply by erecting them. In Better to Have More Lightning in the Hand that power returns, inflated: a heavy-set and nude sculpture with a gaudy crown rests on a rust-patched oil-drum horse. Below, an altar with a Latin plaque reads Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (“It is sweet and just to die for one’s country”). This collage of imperial symbols on junk metal suggests civic memory can be welded from spectacle, not truth by bad-faith actors. A wrought-iron gate topped with dragon finials separates viewers from the park. The dragons glare outward, policing who belongs, while a golden-retriever head faces inward, welcoming those already within. The gate casts the audience as outsiders, conjuring that familiar queer feeling of being present, yet uninvited. The lightning bolt carries two charges. Politically, it shows the expendability of “followers” who absorb real harm while authoritarian leaders remain unscathed. Personally, it distills my phobia of lightning and the abrupt trauma of losing my father. The fallen fence pickets at the canvas edge hint at theater props, underscoring that what we call history is often fabricated theater. I want the image to vibrate between seduction and alarm.
Cate Solari My work is rooted in the spirit of play, drawing from my childhood spent exploring the woods. These early experiences inform my ongoing interactive series, Collaborative Play, which invites viewers to reconnect with their inner child through curiosity and playfulness. Trolleys is a replica of a classic American summer camp team-building activity. Two participants must step onto the wooden slats, hold onto the ropes, and coordinate their movements to walk together. An act that requires physical balance, trust, and communication. Intended for adult participants, Trolleys reopens a space typically reserved for children, asking grown viewers to collaborate, stumble, and play in public. In doing so, I want Trolleys to challenge cultural expectations around performance, control, and self-containment. There must be a willingness to engage, to move in tandem, and to embrace the awkward joy of a shared experience.
Matthew Towers Traditions, routines and secular rituals inspire the objects I make. I have always felt that the vessel form is the most perfect object, and is most often used in these civilized practices. I love to manipulate my forms and control the clay in a way that defies gravity and the “norm” or status quo. I try to conjure mystery and magic in order to make my dreamy fantasies a 3D reality. Like many potters, I work in series making repetitions of forms. This helps me organize my obsessions with shapes, movement, ideas and the various notions on the meaning of function. I idolize classic vessel forms that have helped to define civilization and have been rehashed in many cultures. In my current body of work, I place the forms on exaggerated feet that are inspired by stilettos and platform heels to bring in an element of camp, and to uplift the volume in order to celebrate the bizarre history of humanity and its precarious present. I glaze these pieces with colors that reference classic Red and Black Greek pots with gold luster accents that satiate my desire for ornamentation, beauty and artifice. I substitute the sensual figurative illustrations that were used on many of those ancient pots with forms that mimic rippling flesh. This makes them too eccentric to comfortably utilize as utilitarian pots, and instead transforms them into a different type of vessel.
Yves François Wilson If We Leave Now is a silent, multi-channel video installation composed of slow-motion portraits filmed in public spaces. Each frame invites a kind of pause a soft interruption of time where the viewer can fully encounter the presence of another person. These moments are quiet but intentional, asking us to consider what it means to be seen without being explained. The work was filmed in Bridgeport and New Haven, cities shaped by migration, labor, and erasure. It draws on shared visual language the glance, the stillness, the breath between movements as a way of holding space for collective memory. I think of it as a non-material architecture, a place made of light and duration, where stories and ways of knowing can be felt even if they’re not spoken aloud. This piece is part of an ongoing effort to create spaces for recognition.
