Recent Work, Melissa Zexter

The Creiger-Dane Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibit of works by Boston artist Mary Behrens and New York artist Melissa Zexter from March 1 to 25, 2000. We will have an opening reception on Friday, March 3, 6 to 8 pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 am to 5:30 pm or by appointment

Mary Behrens and Melissa Zexter both use photography as the central medium in their work, though they expand the traditional perimeters of photography's formal properties. Behrens creates large-scale color montages aligned in a grid, while Zexter combines portraiture with a painstakingly hand-sewn, textured surface.

In her second show at The Creiger-Dane Gallery, Mary Behrens will be exhibiting large-scale color photo montages from a new series, The Far & Away. Blurring the line between the real and the imagined, Behrens creates landscapes which evoke a dream-like nostalgia as well as a sense of remoteness. Her fragmented images of nature are pieced together in hazy tones, conveying at once feelings of familiarity, of loss and intangibility. Referencing as source material the genre of nature photography as well as 19th century fin-de-siecle impressionist painting, Behrens recreates images of the land that are neither quite believable nor wholly made-up. In her review of Behrens' 1998 show Women, Babies & Cars, Mary Sherman (The Boston Herald) wrote "Behrens' images testify to our need to hold on to such pleasant thoughts of an ideal existence even though reality may scream out the precariousness and tenuous nature of such ideals".

In her first show at the Creiger-Dane Gallery, Melissa Zexter will be exhibiting a new series of embroidered photographic portraits. In the early years of photography there were many unintentionally anonymous photographers and anonymous sitters. Melissa Zexter makes photographic portraits that intentionally veer away from character and likeness, often cropping and silhouetting the human form in order to question identity. Hand-stitched puzzles - a map of a bus route, a map of a Russian city, a floral pattern from a childhood dress - serve as grids that overlap portraits. In combining the slow and meditative process of hand-sewn embroidery with the technologically more immediate medium of photography, Zexter creates structured objects that are embodiments of both fragmentation and focused concentration. In a disconnected and impersonal age, these portraits simplify the human being to create a sense of ordered verisimilitude within our fragmented society. Melissa Zexter has lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York for the past twelve years. She has exhibited at galleries and museums throughout New York and New England.


If you are interested in any of these works, feel free to email geeta@creiger-dane.com.

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