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Shilo Ratner
Studio Tours
In a time where we are all physically distanced in sharing our creativity, ECOCA offers a platform with our Studio Tour series to peer into the current challenges, new endeavors, and innovative creative spaces that have been forged from current circumstances.
Debuting every Wednesday at 4 pm on our Instagram and Facebook, these studio tours will take a look into the lives of artists and the spaces within which they create their latest works. Profiles of the artists highlighted within these tours will be gradually added onto this page as a living archive.
If you are interested in showing your studio space, please contact Maxim Schmidt at info@elycenter.org
Featured Artists
April 22 : Ethan Minsker
Studio Tour
Ethan H. Minsker is an American writer and filmmaker. He was diagnosed at an early age as being both highly dyslexic and highly intelligent. He is the co-founder of the Antagonist Movement, Inc., a consortium of artists, writers and musicians based in New York’s East Village. Mr. Minsker is also the creator and editor-in-chief of Psycho Moto Zine, which has been in publication since 1988. He lives in New York City.
April 29 : Manju Shandler
Studio Tour
Manju Shandler has had solo shows at Brown University's Sarah Doyle Gallery for Feminist Art, The Hammond Museum, The Honfleur Gallery, and The Governor’s Island Art Fair, among others. She has received an Emmy Nomination, Innovative Theatre Award, a Jim Henson Foundation Grant and was an Emerging Artist at the Eugene O’Neill Puppetry Conference. She is one of the original sculptors of masks and puppetry for The Lion King on Broadway.
May 6 : Jackie Brown
Studio Tour
Jackie Brown is a multimedia artist using natural materials to investigate the relationship between the domestic interior and the natural world.
“I have a strong desire to see the stuff of the earth. As well as walking out to harvest materials, I harvest materials from inside the domestic interior and from humans themselves. I want to form a strong connection between the materials of ourselves and the materials of the natural world. I want them to work alongside to create their own mythology.”
May 13: Austin Furtak-Cole
Studio Tour
Austin’s work has been featured in Maake Magazine, New American Paintings, Art Maze Magazine, Friend of the Artist, and Brooklyn Magazine. His work has also been shown at Summertime Gallery, Room Art Space, Rad Hourani, Harpy Gallery, The Hole, Open House Blog, Park Place Gallery, and Denise Bibro Fine Art. He currently lives and works from the Green Mountains of Vermont.
May 20: Christina Massey
Studio Tour
Christina Massey is a New York multimedia artist and creator of the USPS Art Project, created to inspire collaboration and support the US Postal Service.
“I am fascinated by that “in-between”, creating work that is somewhere in the middle of painting and sculpture, craft and fine art, masculine and feminine, even abstract and representational.”
May 27: Neil Daigle Orians
Studio Tour
Neil is an artist and curator born outside of Chicago, raised in Nebraska and now living and working in Connecticut. Neil’s writing and curatorial practice can be found at Impossible Press. He currently serves as the Visual Arts Manager at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT and is a co-founder of Wherehouse, a DIY multidisciplinary arts space.
June 8: Scott Lawrence
Studio Tour
Scott Lawrence is an installation artist in New Haven, CT. Lawrence received his BFA from The Atlanta College of Art, and graduated with his MFA from the School of Visual Artist in NYC in 2008. His work has been exhibited across the east coast, and as far as Vancouver, BC.
June 10: Alan Neider
Studio Tour Part 1 / Part 2
For the past three years Neider has been sewing textured fabric on and painting into U-Haul moving blankets. His current work involves quilted blankets, fabric and paint. These paintings are free hanging with paint being handled in an expressive and gestural manner.
June 10: Joan Fitzsimmons
Studio Tour Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3
Joan Fitzsimmons is a practicing photographer who has explored varying iterations of the photographic image.
“I tend to work on several projects at once. I’ve examined the tenuous, ebbing boundaries between reality and perception. The ordinary act of living is endlessly complex and uncertain. It is through the ordinary that, for me, the world resonates.”
June 15: Faustin Adeniran
Studio Tour
Faustin Adeniran is a contemporary artist from Lagos, Nigeria working in New Haven, Connecticut. For the past eight years, his work has been to re-imagine materials that would otherwise be considered trash or recyclable. Through extensive historical research and deep observation of cultural trends, his work takes a critical view of social and political issues. Faustin's art series reflect elements of the communities he encounters. His vision is to encourage, educate, and inspire positive social impact through his artworks.
June 24: Kathleen Melian
Studio Tour
Kathleen Melian is a painter living and working in Los Angeles, California. She received a BS in Design Science from Arizona State University before completing her MFA at Claremont Graduate University in 2012.
July 1: Holly Wong
Studio Tour
Holly Wong is an artist who lives and works in San Francisco, California. She was educated at the San Francisco Art Institute where she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in New Genres. Holly creates installations, assemblages and works on paper, integrating non-traditional approaches with more traditional sewing techniques associated with the history of women. Her approach is both non-conventional but also deeply rooted in her history and culture.
July 6: House of Interpretation
Studio Tour
Founded out of a warehouse in West Haven, CT by brothers James and Tyler Cofrancesco, the space currently known as House of Interpretation serves a number of functions — a performance venue, a maker-space, and a gallery, to name a few — all in pursuit of encouragement for all art forms. The collective consists of over a dozen artists, as well as a host of transient creators who are invited into the space to work.
July 15: Cat Balco
Studio Tour
Cat Balco has shown her paintings, murals, and collaborative projects widely; recent and upcoming venues include Volta Art Fair, NYC; Rick Wester Fine Art, NYC; Pulse Art Fair, Miami; and Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT. Recently, her solo show My Exploding Stars was on view at Rick Wester Fine Art in NYC from November 2019 until January 2020. Balco received a B.A. and an M.F.A. from Yale University.
July 20: Matt Neckers
Studio Tour
Matt Neckers is a visual artist and teaching artist who works in a variety of media including sculpture, photography, painting and installation. His Mobile Museum Project, The Vermont International Museum of Contemporary Art + Design, has toured multiple locations in Vermont including the Kent Museum, an abandoned asbestos mine, a remote pond, the Museum of Everyday Life, Burlington City Arts, the Fairbanks Museum.
July 22: Geoffrey Detrani
Studio Tour
Geoffrey Detrani is a New Haven visual artist and writer whose work has been exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Los Angles, Boston and South Korea and other locales. He is primarily interested in imagery that explores a hypothetical intersection between the natural world and the built environment.
July 29: John DeSousa
Studio Tour
Working out of Troy, NY, John DeSousa is a multidisciplinary visual artist. His work focuses on the relationships formed between my hand and the material’s nature; the suffering in striving for desired outcomes; the tension our bodies hold; and ways more problems are often created in searching for solutions.
August 5: Grace Hager
Studio Tour
Grace Hager is a Branford painter that zeroes in on color, pattern, and natural elements within her work. Largely working in still-life, her compositions are assembled from collected, second-hand objects and textiles alongside natural subjects like cut flowers, houseplants, and bones.
August 17: Insook Hwang
Studio Tour
Insook Hwang is a multidisciplinary artist who describes her role as an artist as the need to “ inspire and energize people with love and positive energy through my art, which is creating magical forms and imaginative spaces.” Of her artistic practice, Hwang states, “Through my playful abstract forms, I portray a metaphorical world where there are no cultural, political, racial, religious, national and ideological differences - no boundaries. It is a transcendental space filled with love and joyful energy of the universe.”
August 19: Taylor Chamberlain
Studio Tour
Taylor A. Chamberlain graduated from Albertus Magnus College in 2017 with a BA in Psychology and Art and a concentration in Art Therapy. For nearly a year and a half thereafter, Taylor worked as an expressive arts coordinator in New Haven, CT while also serving as a volunteer research assistant at Albertus, focusing on LGBTQIA+ relationships. Currently, Taylor is a second year graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in the Master of Arts in Art Therapy and Counseling program (MAATC).
August 24: Gelah Penn
Studio Tour
In her site-responsive installations and constructed drawings, Penn assembles experiences of visual ambiguity. Through cutting, layering, tearing, stapling and stretching lightweight synthetic materials, she foregrounds internal conceptual and formal dualities: substance and immateriality, cohesion and fragmentation, object and image, banality and bling. Penn's aim is to choreograph events of perceptual incident.
August 26: David Borawski
Studio Tour
David Borawski is a multi-media installation artist and curator working in Hartford, CT, largely creating text-based installations.
September 2: Loren Eiferman
Studio Tour
Loren Eiferman is a sculptor working with repurposed wood and natural materials. Of her practice, Eiferman states, “My work can be called the ultimate recycling: where I take the detritus of nature and turn it into a new art. Nothing in my studio goes to waste.”
September 9: Susan McCaslin
Studio Tour
Susan McCaslin is a multidisciplinary artist working out of Westville in New Haven, CT. Her work is largely informed by themes of protection, ephemera, and somberness. McCaslin primarily works with water-based mediums on paper in various muted tones.
September 16: Adam Viens
Studio Tour
Adam Viens is a mixed medium artist working out of Middletown, CT.
September 21: Megan Craig
Studio Tour
Megan Craig is a painter and an Associate Professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University. She has exhibited her paintings nationally and internationally. Her research is focused around accounts of memory, sensibility, and the ethical importance of ambiguity – with a particular focus on sensation, synaesthesia, color and color perception. Craig is also the graphic designer for Firehouse 12 Records, and a mother of two.
September 30: Jaynie Crimmins
Studio Tour
Jaynie Gillman Crimmins, a New York City based artist, creates alternative narratives from quotidian materials. She fabricate objects with meticulous handmade details that contrast with the banality of their materials. By repurposing solicitations, safety envelopes, and catalogs that are difficult to recycle (because their inks have high concentrations of heavy metals), her work explores consumerism and waste through a repetitive practice mirroring domestic tasks.
October 7: Isadora Stowe
Studio Tour
Isadora Stowe is a New Mexico based multi-media artist whose work focuses on the narrative of environment translated and coded into complex psychological landscapes. Stowe grew up in the southwest border region, living and working in New Mexico, Texas and Mexico. She credits these experiences for providing a heightened awareness of geographical and political boundaries; and a fascination with the exploration of identity of self and the construction of home in her work.
October 14: Christopher Mir
Studio Tour
Christopher Mir was born in 1970 in Baltimore, Maryland. He grew up in Camden, Maine, and now lives and works in Hamden, Connecticut. As a painter, Mir largely explores fantastic landscapes and figurative configurations that he refers to as “Dream Worlds.”
October 21: Lisa Petker-Mintz
Studio Tour
Of her artistic practice, Lisa states, “When people view my art I want them to see it as a cohesive painting, while reflecting on the beauty, composition, movement, and magic that happened as well. I hope they discover something new each time they view it.”
October 28: Yvonne Shortt
Studio Tour
Yvonne Shortt is a New York artist & social practitioner. Her series, African American Marbleization, is a series of guerrilla sculptures that serve as her response to oppression and racisms of African Americans in art, history, and her country. The pieces are cast in marble dust and installed outdoors guerrilla style as installations or small sculptures. The fragment pieces typically are installed on underpasses or other cement structures while the busts are often coupled with natural materials like water, wood, and the earth.
November 4: Christine Lee Tyler
Studio Tour
Christine Tyler is a Brooklyn-based artist who received her MFA from Brooklyn College in 2019 and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1998. She has had solo exhibitions at the Shangyuan Art Museum in Beijing and the Monfai Cultural Center in Thailand. She works across mediums exploring organic and inorganic forms.
November 11: Camille Eskell
Studio Tour
Camille Eskell exhibits her work extensively in solo and group shows throughout the U.S. and abroad, including Mexico and South America. Her practice encompasses two- and three-dimensional disciplines, including drawing, painting, photo-based imagery, and sculpture; the techniques are often integrated and combined with a variety of materials, found objects, and ready-mades which form layers of meaning.
November 18: Fritz Horstman
Studio Tour
Fritz Horstman is an artist and educator, whose art addresses the ever-moving seam between nature and culture. Because it permeates every corner of human life and every aspect of the dialectic is in response to its opposite , the modes of presenting his findings are diverse. He employs drawing, photography, installation, objects, sound, and video.
December 2: Ellen Weider
Studio Tour
Ellen Weider was born in New York City and holds an MFA from Pratt Institute. She works across mediums, rendering images that float in a mysterious, ambiguous space. Some suggest houses, buildings, rooms, and other architectural structures. There are no inhabitants, but the structures themselves sometimes evoke human presence and human interactions.
December 9: Alex Paik
Studio Tour
Alex Paik is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. His modular, paper-based wall installations explore perception, interdependence, and improvisation within structure while engaging with the complexities of social dynamics. He has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally, and is Founder and Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces and Director at Trestle Gallery.
December 16: Deborah Druick
Studio Tour
Deborah Druick was born in Montreal, Canada and graduated from The Montreal Museum School of Art and Design, where she earned her B.F.A., and Concordia University, where she earned her M.F.A. equivalent. She has lived and worked in Hong Kong where she had a solo show of paintings and drawings. She has also participated in exhibitions in Macau, China and all over the New York tri-state region. She now lives and works in the Bronx, NY. Druick's paintings address issues of gender definition, self-identification and female objectification, using stylized figuration and saturated high-key color.
December 30: Dan Gries
Studio Tour
After earning a Ph.D. in mathematics from Ohio State, Dan Gries taught for several years at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, and in a visiting position at Hamilton College in New York, before settling into private school teaching at Hopkins School in New Haven, Connecticut, where he currently resides. His passion and focus changes over time, but these days it is mainly devoted to digital prints and some public installations. He has had works exhibited and installed in spots around the New Haven area.
January 6: Michael Dixon
Studio Tour
Michael Dixon is an oil painter born in San Diego, California. He received his Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder in painting and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Arizona State University in painting and drawing. His imagery explores the personal, societal, and aesthetic struggles of belonging to both "white" and "black" racial and cultural identities, yet simultaneously belonging fully to neither. The works of artists such as Robert Colescott, Beverly McIver, Michael Ray Charles, Glenn Ligon, and Kerry James Marshall has informed his work.
January 20: Ann Cofta
Studio Tour
Ann is primarily a textile artist whose work combines sewing, printmaking, embroidery and quilting techniques. My current series includes the city imagery that surrounds us, grounds us, and connects us to memories of places from our collective pasts. Buildings and structures create stability and continuity in an ever-changing world.
January 27: Sascha Mallon
Studio Tour
Sascha makes small ceramic sculptures representing female figures, plants, and animals and group them in site-specific installations. Her work is predominantly about the cycle of life, and within that context her sculptures serve as pictograms, carriers of hidden messages, and memento mori. She create dreamlike worlds whose narratives illustrate relationships, transitions, and dichotomies such as life/death. Her approach to making work is intuitive and spontaneous, and she is inspired by her thoughts and memories as well as the world around her.
February 3: Kelly Boehmer
Studio Tour
In Kelly’s sculptures, visceral scenes display a tragic sense of humor. Creatures that are being flayed, tar and feathered, or molting are symbols of not being comfortable in her own skin and growth through experience. Saturated colors and furry textures are juxtaposed with taxidermy jaws and gore, in her work. Delicate, sheer fabrics and faux fur “soften the blow,” making anxieties easier to confront. The response of attraction/repulsion that we have to this imagery relates to the emotional complexity inherent in our relationships, fantasies, and anxieties. Iconic works from art history, such as the Capitoline She-Wolf, the Laocoön Group, the Arnolfini Portrait, etc., often serve as a starting point for her work.
February 10: Cynthia Cooper
Studio Tour
Cynthia is making paintings that are light-drenched and joyful no matter what else has been happening in the world. She is not ignoring negative events— rather she is processing them into paintings that reflect her optimistic outlook. Her approach is using juxtaposition, repetition and color relationships with stripes that evolve into curves. These curves are her vocabulary for movement in the right direction, a hopeful upward trajectory. They depict not only her present experience but also where she hopes she is heading, along with what she is wishing for everyone else: Rising toward transformation.
February 17: Chancellor Page
Studio Tour
Chancellor’s paintings examine personal and collective loss, and provide a place to grieve, pray, re-interpret and heal. This process allows the sacred and sordid to thrive in the same cage, and ultimately replays the loop of vulnerability and hope.
February 24: Kwadwo Adae
Studio Tour
Kwadwo’s paintings reflect on his fascination with how the manipulation of color mathematics, visual forms, and geometry creates such diversity of interpretation in the experience of the viewer. His work heavily relays themes of social justice, protest, and community.
March 3: Coco Ma
Studio Tour
Coco’s mixed-media sculptures and installations explore topics related to self-reflection, personal relationships, and her identity as an art maker. By being explorative and experimental with a wide range of materials, she creates works that evoke uncertainties, inquiries, and reflections. She has found that subtly unusual things often simultaneously generates familiar feeling, confusion, and amusement as an intricate complexity in art. Underneath the familiarity of the materials is what she thinks of as the 'white noise,' a hum of dissonance between the familiar and the strange.
March 10: Patricia Burns
Studio Tour
Patricia Burns’ work centers on the materiality of the human body and its relationship to architecture. Burns seeks to destabilize architecture by revealing the fragility of its individual components. She creates rigorous sculptures and sculptural installations that are dynamic objects performing in space. The works have a precarious, even anxious beauty that elicits a visceral response in the viewer. An essential aspect of the work is this physical interaction, but more specifically, Burns exploring her own physicality through the process of making.
March 17: Karina Rosenstein
Studio Tour
Karina’s recent work investigates contemporary menstrual culture and critical menstrual studies. They explore the tediousness of managing a period and keeping it hidden, body literacy as a tool for personal empowerment, cyclicality as opposed to linear perceptions of time,and more. Most importantly, the work aims to bring more visibility to a subject so frequently ignored in the hope that increased visibility will beget increased conversation.
March 24: Paul Michael
Studio Tour
Paul Michael is a Connecticut based artist working in video, printmaking, and painting who investigates notions of attention, presence, and feedback loops. The experience surrounding human connection is what shapes his life. His art inspects the possibility of loneliness or empathy by highlighting and even interrupting the way people interact. Bringing awareness to the effort of communication itself, he explores the joys and disappointments in connecting with others.
March 31: Jessica Smolinski
Studio Tour
Jessica Smolinski is a multimedia artist living in New Haven, CT with her artist husband and two creative children. Her artwork centers around ideas of life, death, fleeting moments, and memories. The subject of loss and mourning compel her because she feels like time flies by and therefore the moments we love are over in the blink of an eye. She is inspired by traditional women’s crafts and the overlap of form and function and of making and caring.
April 7: Alyssa McClenaghan
Studio Tour
Alyssa McClenaghan is a New York based artist who received her MFA in Painting from Brooklyn College. In her work, materials traditionally used in the construction and adornment of homes are composed into bodily creatures and domestic objects. Her most recent sculptures, a series of flesh toned radiators, examine the relationship between materials and gender. She sees many parallels between radiators, the human body and psyche - particularly that of the feminine experience, like the long history of the female in a supporting role. Dialogues of femininity, domesticity, warmth, comfort, fragility, strength, necessity, and motherhood are addressed through this collection of objects.
April 14: Gary Sczerbaniewicz
Studio Tour
Gary Sczerbaniewicz is a multimedia artist working in Buffalo, NY. His practice involves an insatiable fascination with architectural spaces that evoke a sense of psychological unease. This compulsion toward an aesthetics of anxiety fuels the two concurrent modes of his work – installation and sculpture. Each format articulates differing aspects of his chosen subject matters - often feeding upon and cross pollinating one another in the process. His works possess an acute fondness for the post-apocalyptic, the weird, the eerie, the occult, alternative histories and the ‘world’ of conspiracy theory.
April 21: Joshua Mintz
Studio Tour
Joshua Mintz creates “childlike” ceramic and clay formations, captivating in their emotional weight. Through a strong dedication to craft, there is a degree of wonkiness that animates each component within the piece, creating intimate sculptures and installations.
April 28: Laurey Bennett-Levy
Relying on city lattice work as topical catalysts of inspiration, Laurey abandons comfort by rolling black-inked brayers onto street grills to collect their impressions. This work’s sequence provokes one to notice unobserved portals and grids and to rediscover the unnoticed splendor of ubiquitous beauty. Laurey redefines ordinary markers of existence, constantly further reducing these geometrics into abstract form and bringing the outside in.
May 5: Shilo Ratner
Shilo Ratner strives to create paintings that evoke an acute awareness and centered meditative state towards our daily surroundings using a tight geometric abstract visual language. Often using a horizon line to create a point of reference for the viewer, her paintings evolve with varied opaque and translucent layers of acrylic paint on canvas. While she creates a time-based visual context for her paintings with sunrises and sunsets in color choices and titles, her hyper-realistic execution of stillness through a tight complex network of lines and forms indicating an almost suffocating state of our present day reality.