The public is invited to an exhibition by New York artist Kate Hamilton from Nov. 11-Dec. 11 in the Wallace Barnes and Barbara Hackman Franklin Art Gallery at Tunxis. Hamilton will talk about her work— room-sized clothes, framed collars and sideways shoes sewn out of waxed paper— on Nov. 17 from 3-4 pm. In Room 6-124. An opening reception will follow from 4-7 p.m. in the Gallery. Refreshments will be served.

Located at the entrance to the 600 Building, the Barnes-Franklin Gallery is open Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m.-8 p.m. For more information, email [email protected].

Excerpts about Hamilton from the artist’s website:

 “Clothes are like shells of identity,” she said. Like the skins shed by the snakes that inhabit the area around her New Paltz home, they are ephemeral and double-edged, signifying absence as much as the body’s presence.

“I was reading Derrida and I came up with the idea of using a material that’s intrinsically valueless,” noted Hamilton. “It’s also extremely lightweight. The stuff looks like it will float away and is made out of nothing.” Yet sewing the waxed-paper clothing was anything but easy, resulting in many rips and discards. Barely there and yet solidly constructed, the pieces are full of contradictions, Hamilton noted.

Hamilton, who teaches costume design to high school and middle school students in Brooklyn, has previously shown her work at New Paltz’s Rock and Snow store, the Dorsky Museum and the Beacon Theater. She has designed costumes for theatrical, operatic and dance performances in New York City, Zurich and Berlin, constructing a skirt with a 35-foot circumference for a singer in a performance by Theater Skok, Zurich, for example, and designing transparent 19th-century aprons with feathers attached for performers suspended from wires in a store window in a Berlin gallery.

She ended up teaching three-dimensional design at Parsons, and also taught a costume workshop at the West Kortright Centre’s teen Shakespeare Workshop, in Delaware County.