Opening Reception: Sunday, February 8, 1-3pm

This exhibition brings together a body of work that reconsiders objects of display: architectural fixtures, vessels, and framing devices as mechanisms through which visibility, desire, and power have historically been negotiated. Drawing from the formal language of sconces, the works examine how bodies are illuminated, elevated, or concealed, and how these gestures continue to shape contemporary ways of seeing.

The term sconce originates from the Old French esconce and the Latin absconsa, meaning “to conceal” or “a hiding place.” Historically, sconces were designed to hold light while obscuring its source, producing controlled illumination that shaped interiors and the bodies within them. In this exhibition, illuminated window-block sculptures house painted nude Black male figures, refracted through glass and lit from above. The figures exist in a suspended state, visible yet mediated, where illumination becomes both an offering and a constraint. Light functions not as a neutral tool, but as an active force that frames the body through histories of surveillance, desire, and selective visibility.

This inquiry extends into vessel-based works that draw from the lineage of trophies. Once understood as monuments of conquest and “prizes of war,” trophies transformed domination into object form. By reworking these shapes without naming them directly, the vessels in this exhibition shift away from triumph toward intimacy, asking what it means to hold presence, memory, and embodiment rather than victory.

Together, the works position familiar forms: fixtures, containers, architectural fragmentsas thresholds rather than endpoints. They invite viewers to consider how systems of display shape meaning, and how Black male bodies, in particular, have been illuminated, obscured, or monumentalized under inherited visual regimes. The exhibition does not seek to resolve these tensions, but to hold them in light, allowing concealment and revelation to coexist, and opening space for new ways of seeing, lingering, and encountering the body.

Opening Reception: Sunday, February 8, 1-3pm

Art making is an intuitive exploration for me, a way to investigate memory and process emotions. Themes of belonging, ephemerality, multiplicity, and transformation recur throughout my work. Repetition and layering act as both process and structure, creating a meditative, reflective rhythm. In my practice, I examine how moments of interaction can be translated into tangible form and how process and method generate expanded meaning. 

What Remains Tied, Bound in Belonging is an installation that explores the relationship between emotion, memory, and belonging — how these elements shift over time and become intertwined with our present experiences. 

Hanging from the ceiling are long spiral twist ties inspired by my discovery of bread ties from my late mother’s kitchen drawer. Collected from family, friends, and newly gathered sources, these ties function as material traces of memory and feeling, made tangible through their form and varied colors. Made into long spiral coils - what I refer to as “memory ties’ - their structure suggests continuation, growth, and interconnectedness.

While audio echoes throughout the space, home videos of my childhood project across the room, fragmented by suspended paper rolls, fabric, and memory ties. The resulting moving images reflect the subjective nature of memory, some moments resurface vividly while others soften or fade away. The installation becomes a site of accumulation, suggesting that wholeness and belonging are not found intact but gradually built - layered over time.

Opening Reception: Sunday, February 8, 1-3pm

My artistic practice centers around transforming everyday objects into anthropomorphic forms, where the material world splits and reconverges, entangling matter to flow, move, and propel forward. I cut, snip, paint, construct, integrate found objects, building materials, and manipulate steel into corporeal assemblages. This process responds to the embodied and disembodied experiences inscribed with societal expectations and norms. Through exploring an aesthetic of repulsion and attraction, my work holds the tension between fragility and strength, trauma and renewal, and tenderness and violence. It reflects how knowledge and understanding are intertwined with history, culture, and power. -Flaaen

a group exhibition from the Ely Center’s Curatorial and Programming Advisory Committee

Exhibition Dates: February 8 - April 12, 2026
Opening Reception: Sunday, February 8, 1-3pm

Intervals mark both pauses and beginnings. Presented by the volunteer artists and curators who make up Ely Center’s Curatorial and Program Advisory Committee, this group exhibition reflects on the spaces between places and moments of change. This invitational exhibition, where our incumbent committee invited artists to join them, responds to another interval, a temporary relocation of our gallery.

The title speaks to these in-between conditions—a break, a measure of time, or a structural division; something that separates while also connecting. Here, it gestures toward the shifting site of the gallery, the dual positions held by artist-curators, and the transition into the organization’s next decade. Intervals is a reflection on where we have been and an opening toward what is to come.

The works in Intervals respond to ideas of construction, duration, conversations, and connectedness. Together, the works support the idea of the Ely Center as a fixed container and a living framework shaped by collective effort. In this moment of temporary architecture and long-term vision, Intervals affirms the importance of art, volunteer labor, shared authorship, and the spaces we build together.

Alexzandria Robin/ Sydney Bell

David Borawski/ Peter Brown

Debbie Hesse/ Marion Belanger

Ellen Hawley | Michael G. Young   

Emily Weiskopf/ Douglas Degges

Fritz Horstman/ Sabrina Marques

Howard el-Yasin/ Susan McCaslin

Jeanne Ciravolo/Janet Warner

Judith Kruger/ Catherine Christiano

Kit Young/Paloma Kop & Andrei Jay

Maria Markham/ Jayden Ashley

Suzan Shutan/ Molly Gambardella