home at ecoca
Home was a group show with photographer Amartya De and painter Vera Wu that ran from November 12, 2023 to January 14, 2024 at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art in New Haven, Connecticut. It was the culmination of a six-week residency in the ECOCA building, an early 20th century Elizabethan-style structure known as the John Slade Ely house.
With my studio set up in the former servants’ quarters, meditations on enclosure, visibility and invisibility, gender, and domesticity guided my work. The collection of collages I produced during the residency period reflect the restrictive, gendered ideas of home as evoked in two books contemporary with the house’s early years: Men of Progress: Connecticut (1898) and Connecticut Beautiful (1922). I worked with the materials of the books—their foxed pages, their leather-clad covers, their images and words—as well as with materials of book and home making—wood, cloth, thread, kitchen paper. Cyanotypes captured the exterior light as it moved through the house and the contents of my great-grandmother’s sewing basket, marking a lace path to an exit.
photo by Seth Callander