Melissa Conroy Featured In Upcoming George Waters Gallery Exhibition
Elmira, NY (09/06/2022) — The George Waters Gallery opens its fall 2022-23 season with artist Melissa Conroy's exhibition "Listening in Slow Motion," a conversation between textiles and drawings. Campus and community members are invited to a free opening reception from 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m., Friday, September 16. Conroy will briefly talk about the installation at 5:00 p.m., inviting audience participation with a question and answer session.
As a Senior Lecturer at Cornell University's Human Centered Design department, Conroy teaches courses in surface design, Fashion CAD, and Knit Design. In this show, Conroy combines conceptual, meditative, and experiential approaches to thinking about fabrics and fashion. She says, "The drawings are an exercise in listening. I sit down, put pen to paper, and find the story along the way, carving away at the space on the page with dashes, dots, curves, or strokes until I can see what the drawing is attempting to communicate. Each knit piece explores the act of drawing in tactile form using material, textile structure, and color exploration. Simplified patterning helps to bring out the material quality of the yarns, allowing the material to speak in a way that is hopefully parallel to the brushwork, stippling, or line quality of a drawing."
Conroy notes that knitting is a much slower process than drawing and she used a hand machine to knit many of the swatches and knit pieces using yarn collected from waste on the floor of her knit studio. She programmed and knit others on a Shima Seiki electronic machine. She summarizes her working process in these words: "Listening in slow motion is about learning from the drawing process and interpreting that process into a new language."
"Listening in Slow Motion" will be on exhibit Monday, September 12 through Friday, October 14. Gallery hours are noon to 4:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. Note: the Gallery will be closed all break October 7-11. The reception and exhibition are free and open to the public.