Melissa Zexter

Thumbnail of Featured Art: Girl with Bow, 2025 Hand embroidery , ink on gelatin silver print, 20" x 24"

Artist Statement: Melissa Zexter combines embroidery with photography. She sews by hand directly onto photographs she has taken, combining a traditional practical skill, embroidery, with a modern and mass reproducible process, photography. The artist’s fundamental concern is to explore the photograph's material status as three-dimensional object as well as to examine identity, memory and technology. Her interest in the creation of hand-crafted, unique photographic objects is related to the proliferation of images in the modern age, one where images – and specifically photographic images – have lost their own object status altogether. Through their manipulations of the image’s surface with embroidery, the photographs become unique, no-longer reproducible objects. Concerned with the interaction between hand and eye in relation to the photographic image, Zexter's complex works explore memory and personal experience while manipulating the generic qualities of the photographic print.

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