Elza Kayal Gallery is pleased to present Vignettes by Jill Moser and Kate Wallace, a collaborative exhibition in which painting and textile engage in a fluid dialogue. Two artistic sensibilities—rooted in distinct mediums—mirror, overlap, and embrace one another to form a shared visual language. Painted fields and shaped textiles co-activate, dissolving traditional boundaries between disciplines.

Each vignette gestures subtly toward the female body. Fabric echoes presence, while painted spaces extend that presence through rhythm, tone, and touch. Colors shift, surfaces provoke, and forms invite viewers to feel rather than merely observe. These works exist as fragments—suggestive, intimate, and unconfined—constructing narratives through texture, gesture, and space rather than figuration.

Clothing, once worn or observed, communicates through material, structure, and trace. The textiles and paintings in Vignettes behave similarly. At times they stand apart; at others, they merge and transform through proximity. Their edges remain porous, functioning as thresholds rather than divisions.

The artists worked with discarded materials donated by Fabscrap, including coated jersey, lingerie elastic, crepe-back satin, horsehair linings, beads, buttons, and other remnants. Through recombination and re-contextualization, these materials shed original meanings and acquire new significance. The process was grounded in discovery, responding to what emerged in the moment of making. Each piece resists replication, emphasizing uniqueness, care, and renewal.

Vignettes 1–6 include large and medium size works combining acrylic on archival watercolor paper with textiles, cords, hardware, and repurposed garments. The smaller works in Jewel Box, are composed of Japanese handmade papers on archival board, with buttons, beads, lingerie elastics & hardware, ribbons and fabric remnants. These pieces honor 20th-century women artists—Anni Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hannah Höch, Meret Oppenheim, Louise Bourgeois, Judith Scott, Yayoi Kusama, and others—whose radical experimentation expanded the possibilities of textiles and challenged conventional boundaries.

The collaboration between Jill Moser and Kate Wallace emerges from their shared interest in gesture, material, and expressive form. Moser, whose work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the National Gallery of Art, brings decades of exploration in gestural line and narrative mark-making. Wallace, a creative leader and sustainability advocate with over twenty years in the global fashion industry, contributes expertise in material culture, design systems, and the transformative potential of discarded textiles. Together, they reimagine the relationship between surface, structure, and the body.