FLEX://
Exhibition Dates: June 20 -August 31, 2025
The Ely Center of Contemporary Art is proud to present FLEX://, curated by JLS Gangwisch. Best viewed on a computer.
To celebrate Pride 2025 the Ely Center of Contemporary Art 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.
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.
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.
Joseph Annino Joseph Vincent Annino (he/him/his), signing his works as JoViAn, is a self taught artist working in a variety of mediums since 2015. He explores themes of connection and isolation, the body and the environment, through a photographic practice translated into paint. Joseph has exhibited at several Connecticut juried shows and events. Joseph lives and works in Newtown CT.
Kelsey Archbold Kelsey Jenkinson-Archbold grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, a place that has left its creative mark on her, surrounded by the vast nature and its folklore. In 2009 Kelsey received her BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, where she majored in Painting. Since becoming a mother, Kelsey’s relationship with art has grown and deepened. Her newest series of oil paintings explore her own relationship with femininity, domesticity, and the societal pressures that are placed upon women and caregivers. In 2024 Kelsey Archbold had her first solo show at the LockhartPost Gallery. She has shown her work in the Georgetown Art Center, The CloudTree Gallery, The Tin Whistle Gallery among others. She has been represented by the Austin Art Garage and Met/Gal Art + Advisory in Austin, and her interviews have been published by VoyageAustin, Almost Real Things, and Brushstrokes. After living in central Texas for over 10 years, Kelsey now resides in New Haven, Connecticut with her husband and two small children. They remain her biggest inspiration.
Finley Doyle Finley Doyle is a Harlem-based artist. She grew up between Vermont and France, and established her painting practice while she was studying comparative literature at Yale. After college, she moved to New York, where she spent two years teaching preschool. In May, she earned her MFA in Studio Art from NYU.
Ana Maria Farina Ana Maria Farina is a Brazilian artist now based in the Hudson Valley, New York. Farina’s work has been featured on New American Paintings, Hyperallergic, Highlands Current, I Like Your Work Podcast, Visionary Art Collective, and in venues around the world such as the SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, Future Fair, the Wassaic Project, the Garrison Art Center, the Dorsky Museum, Paradice Palase, Abigail Ogilvy, Susan Eley Fine Art, Woman Made Gallery, Woodstock Museum, Subject Matter Art Gallery (London, UK), and Casa de Criadores (SP, Brazil). Farina attended Columbia University and SUNY New Paltz for her graduate studies and she is the 2021 recipient of the national CAA Fellowship in Visual Arts.
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. Horisberger is an artist based in Connecticut. They received their B.F.A in Studio Art and B.A. in Art History at the University in Connecticut in 2025.
David Kuehler Born in San Jose, California, Kuehler now lives and works in Connecticut. While his style references abstract expressionism, figurative impressionism, and elements of local and contemporary vernacular, Kuehler’s approach to pictorial space—marked by vivid gestures, thick dripping paint, and delicate washes—is uniquely his own. His solo exhibitions include Be Safe Be Seen, at the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland and Half-Life of Memory, part of New Haven’s City-Wide Open Studios. His Group exhibitions include The Will to Change: Gathering as Praxis at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, Kehler Liddell Gallery, and Rituals of Resistance with New Haven’s Nasty Women Collective. As a designer and producer at The Walt Disney Company and Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Centers, Kuehler created immersive cinematic environments. His theatrical credits include the world premiere of Souls on Fire and HBO’s Tuskegee Airmen. He has taught at ArtCenter College of Design and Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, participated in the Sundance Institute’s Producers Lab, and served as a program advisor for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency. Kuehler holds a BFA in Painting from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts and studied acting under E. Katherine Kerr at Playwrights Horizons in New York.
Kayce Lewandowski Kayce Lewandowski is a contemporary painter based in Bridgeport, Connecticut where she is known for her surreal figurative work and vibrant style. Kayce grew up in New Hampshire where her passion for art and creativity was established at a young age. She is currently pursuing her bachelor’s of fine arts at Sacred Heart University and has future goals of earning an MFA to become a college professor. Kayce has won numerous awards during her time at Sacred Heart that have only motivated her to push her work further both conceptually and technically. As she also studies the performing art of dance, Kayce finds the human figure to be fascinating subject matter with the stories it can convey. In her current body of work she focuses on human connection and psychological disorders in an ominous manner.
Caroline McAuliffe Caroline McAuliffe is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and community organizer. She blends life and art through costume and play to explore the identity-shifting experience of motherhood, its myths, and her desires and discomforts within the role. Caroline holds an M.F.A. from Pratt Institute and currently works as an arts educator in New York City. Her work has appeared in group shows both nationally and internationally, including the Montclair Art Museum of New Jersey, The Children’s Museum of Arts in Manhattan, Kyoto Shibori Museum of Japan, and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea. She is a semifinalist for the 2025 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and 2025 fellow of Saltonstall Residency. Caroline currently lives and creates in Brooklyn with her wife and child.
Michael Morgan Morgan earned his Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Sciences & Policy from Northwestern University in 2014. After the passing of his father, he shifted his focus from a legal career to art and art education. He went on to graduate from Columbia University with a second Bachelor’s degree in visual arts. During his time at Columbia, he was also a researcher and graphic designer at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment and was a finalist for the 2020 Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics for his writings on environmental theory and art. Currently pursuing his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Visual Arts at Cornell University, Morgan works across mediums including painting, sculpture, collage, and mixed-media installations. His work often highlights underrepresented voices, including a project honoring Christine Jorgensen, a prominent trans figure from his hometown. He lives, works, and studies in Ithaca, New York.
Cate Solari Recent solo exhibitions include See-Saw Shape at the Schumacher Gallery (Middlebury CT, 2024) and Step into your ALIBI at the Dye and Bleach House Community Gallery (Willington CT, 2022). Notable group exhibitions include: The Lyman Allyn Museum of Art (New London, CT), ArtPort Kingston with the Ely Center for Contemporary Art (ECOCA) (Kingston, NY), and Comfort Station (Chicago, IL). Recognized for their contributions to art education, Solari has served as a Visiting Lecturer at Westfield State University and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Connecticut, where they were awarded Adjunct Faculty Member of the Year in 2022. Solari earned their MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Sculpture (2020). Cate is currently pursuing a second Master’s degree in Art Teaching at Southern Connecticut State University and continuing her studio practice.
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 Yves François Wilson is a multidisciplinary artist, cinematographer, and educator based in New Haven, Connecticut. His work blends video, photography, sculpture, and found materials to explore memory, migration, and the shared visual language of marginalized communities. Rooted in diasporic storytelling and public space, his projects have been shown nationally and internationally, including at NXTHVN, The Norwalk Art Space, and in recent residencies in France and Italy. Wilson creates spaces for visibility, care, and cultural memory through time-based media.