EMBROIDERED LAYERS EMBELLISHED STORIES: MELISSA ZEXTER
MELISSA ZEXTER
Melissa Zexter shoots beautiful photos. Some are digital. Some, she develops and prints. What comes next is the awesome part. She adds another layer of beauty.
Zexter embellishes the photos with embroidery. She engages a slow and meditative process of hand-sewing, layering an ancient craft on a more contemporary artform. Many of Zexter’s pieces explore female identity and representations of femininity.
The embroidery transforms the portraits, creating new aspects to the personality of the subject. The threads seem both full of symbolism and of emotional expression.
Zexter transforms her 2 dimensional photos into 3D works of art. In doing so, she takes an artform that is highly reproducible and make each photo permanently unique. Her creative mission examines issues of identity, memory and technology.
The sewn patterns create colored textured drawings over top of the photographic images. The stitched threads form webs, grids, and filters, creating layers of narrative, over flat surfaces.
In some pieces, the embroidered stitches serve to give the images a vintage feel, while others do the opposite, pushing the images towards a more modern edge.
Zexter thinks of the photograph as something from the past and the thread as a reaction to the past and present. The thread makes the photograph more personal to her and allows her to meditate on the image.
The artist received her first camera when she was eight years old. At first, she wanted to become a photojournalist. But she began to see photos as commodities, easily taken and reproduced. She wanted to make her photos unique. And, since she always loved needlework, she began to combine embroidery with her photography. She has been producing these mixed media works for over 20 years.
As her work evolved, her generic anonymous portraits became more specific. Most of her subjects are people that she knows, including a recent series featuring her daughters.
All of the photos in Zexter’s works are her own. She often invents new stitches. Her process is very intuitive in terms of pattern and color. She became increasingly interested in how thread blended in and reacted to the photographs and how it transformed them, adding color, texture, and meaning.
While she adds layers of color to her images, she has a particular love of black and white photography. She is influenced by Peter Hujar, Lillian Bassman, and Diane Arbus.
Zexter 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 Triennale Design Museum, Fuller Craft Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Muriel Guepin Gallery, Robert Mann Gallery, among others.
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