Melissa Zexter | Phantom Web
On View May 13th – June 25th
Opening Reception: May 13th, 4–6 PM
Artist Talk scheduled for Saturday, June 3rd at 2pm.
Melissa Zexter’s work combines embroidery with photography to explore memory and personal experience. Sewing by hand directly onto photographs she has taken, Zexter combines the traditional, practical skill of embroidery with the modern and reproducible process of photography. The results are hand-crafted, unique photographic objects in an age where images– specifically photographic images – have lost their ‘object status’ altogether. In exploring the photograph’s ontology – its material status as a three-dimensional object – Zexter opens a conversation around issues of identity and memory are shaped by photographic technology. Each photographic work becomes unique and unreproducible, as a result of Zexter’s manipulating the image’s surface with embroidery or the partial removal of the emulsion.
Zexter was born in Rhode Island and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from New York University. Zexter has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including shows at Muriel Guépin Gallery, NY, The Triennial Design Museum in Milan, Italy, The Fuller Craft Museum, MA, Robert Mann Gallery, NY, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Her work has been published and reviewed in numerous publications, including ELEPHANT, AfterImage, Juxtapoz, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and New York Magazine.
Acknowledgments
The activities of the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance are made possible in part by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support from the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
