ECOCA’s Keyhole Workspace Residency provides 3 artists with free studio space for 4 months followed by an exhibition. There are two cohorts per year: spring and fall. Each cohort receives studio visits from guest curators and artists, a small material stipend, and support from ECOCA’s staff.
Parastoo Ahovan is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Connecticut. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Boston University in 2014. Working across sculpture, painting, installation, textiles, video, and performance, her practice explores material, form, and embodied experience. Ahovan’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the 56th Venice Biennale (Italy), EUNAM Museum (Gwangju, South Korea), Nouchin Pahlevan Gallery (Paris, France), Leila Heller Gallery (New York), the Tehran Sculpture Biennial (Iran), the Mykonos Biennial (Athens, Greece), and High Line Nine Gallery (New York). Her sculptures are also installed in urban spaces across Iran, Turkey, Spain, India, the UAE, Italy, France, China, and the United States.
Ciara Curwen was born and homeschooled in essentially the woods of Upstate New York. She plans to remain on the East Coast. Curwen, who works in a variety of mediums (painting, printmaking, photography, CNC milling) has one goal: to locate tributaries from which the root of drawing can flow. She selects materials and creates marks to make images and address image-making directly. Curwen is exceptionally interested in the figure-ground, memory, and phenomenology. She studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Aura Wang is a Chinese-born painter working primarily in oil. Drawing from both Eastern and Western ancient cultures, she combines shared figure and symbolic forms from Eastern and Western ancient cultures and mythology to create a surreal healing space that evokes collective human memory and a sense of ancestral connection.