PRESS

ARTILLERY MAGAZINE NYC - OUTSIDE LA: Frieze NY and New York Art Week - May 2023

By Annabel Keenan

Future Fair was a standout of Art Week Part One. The young fair brought endless abstraction and bold curatorial decisions. A standout was Trotter & Sholer’s booth presented with Melhop Gallery, which paired colorful, mixed-media paintings by Alex Stern with equally vibrant cotton embroidery on canvas by Stewart Francis Easton. The two bodies of work complemented each other in a way that made it hard to believe their practices weren’t previously intertwined. Though working in different mediums, the parallel colors, shapes and textures made each piece visually stronger and more dynamic—a remarkable reminder of the power of good curating and one of the few presentations that still sticks out a week later….. Read more here

NEW VISIONARY Magazine NYC issue 6 May 2023

ARTS TO HEARTS MAGAZINE - Artist Feature

Issue 2 2023

DOUBLESCOOP ART - GUERRILLA GALLERY

When photographer and New Zealand native Frances Melhop opened her art space, Melhop Gallery °7077, in Zephyr Cove two years ago, it was with a desire to provide a much-needed commercial space for showcasing artists long term—an offering she felt was too scant in Northern Nevada. It wasn’t long before she understood why they were scarce.

“People are up in the mountains to do sport and hide out and just chill, and they don’t have that kind of gallery-visiting practice that you have in a major city,” she said. “I really enjoyed having a beautiful gallery space, but after about two years sitting in a white cube, I was thinking, ‘I can’t just keep hammering away at something that people aren’t responding to.’”

What people did respond to, she realized, were events. Visitors enjoyed art-focused events that involved experiences and enabled them to interact with people and art.

“I decided what would be a more interesting way of doing things would be to go kind of guerilla style and just pop up in really unusual places that are much more relevant to the actual artists’ work,” she explained.... READ MORE HERE

TAHOE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE 2022 - 2023 - A FRESH TAKE ON ART

By Kayla Anderson

MELHOP GALLERY º7077

New Zealand native Frances Melhop has a storied career as a photographer in the art/fashion/design world, living and working in big cities in Italy, France, England and Australia before settling on Tahoe’s East Shore with her husband in 2018. After moving to Tahoe, Melhop earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Nevada, Reno, taught art classes at the university and several community colleges in Northern Nevada, and formed an artists’ residency program in Virginia City.

Her latest venture involved opening a contemporary art gallery in Zephyr Cove in May 2020, which she named Melhop Gallery °7077. But the endeavor is already changing forms.

Melhop believes the Tahoe art scene is unique in the sense that people don’t necessarily come to the lake to shop for art, and she learned during the pandemic that she would need to approach the mountain region differently than the big cities of Milan, Sydney, London and others.

“There was an art exhibit opening every week in those places, but you just don’t have that here,” Melhop says. “I think people come here to hide out or for sport.”

Melhop decided the best way to represent her 12 local, national and international artists—local talents such as South Shore resident Julia Schwadron Marianelli and Kings Beach native Galen Brown—would be to transform her gallery into a “nomadic curatorial project” in addition to offering an online art-selling platform.

So she began organizing guerilla-style pop-up exhibitions, starting with an event reception on November 11 featuring artist Miya Hannan held in the opium den of Truckee’s Old Chinese Herb Shop, which is now the studio of HSH Interiors. Melhop says not being restricted to a gallery space allows her to provide better exposure for the artists she represents. She hopes her roving gallery, which she calls Melhop Projects, brings an inspired, novel approach to how people think about contemporary art galleries... READ MORE HERE

TAHOE WEEKLY 2022 - MELHOP GALLERY º7077: ART WITH CONCEPTUAL, ETHICAL SUBSTANCE

by Kayla Anderson

Works of art pop out on stark white walls in a gallery in Zephyr Cove next to Engel & Völkers. This bright and airy space on the corner of Highway 50 and Elks Point Road with contemporary creations is the new Melhop Gallery °7077, named after owner Frances Melhop and the the elevation of her favorite hike to Shakespeare Rock on the East Shore.

Melhop has been living in the Northern Nevada region for the past decade working on her master’s degree with a focus in fine arts from University of Nevada, Reno; teaching art classes at Western Nevada College and Truckee Meadows Community College; and exhibiting her artwork in solo and group exhibitions near and far. Melhop is credited for building up the artists’ residency program at St. Mary’s Art Center in Virginia City, Nev.; in 2014, she won the NNDA Comstock Innovator of the Year award for her cultural contributions to the historic town…. READ MORE HERE

Double Scoop Arts 2021 - Long Term View

by Kris Vagner

There’s something deeply satisfying about watching an artist’s work develop over time. Take Frances Melhop. In the 90s and 2000s, the New Zealand native worked in Australia and Milan, shooting fashion photos for magazines like Marie Claire and Vogue. Back then, the strength of her imagery relied on subverting commercial narratives with stripes of fairytale and fantasy. In later years, with the photographs she’s made to show in galleries, she’s held up a mirror to portraiture—a form that we might think of as conveying “reality”—and examined the many ways we construct and present our identities.

Her images come in groups. Each group might include ghost-like figures in abandoned rooms, the people and architecture in and near Virginia City, or facial features borrowed from strangers’ Instagram selfies. For different groups, Frances uses different technologies—anything from post-Civil-War tintypes to video to cyanotypes on fabric. To watch her progression over the years is to watch her pull back the curtain on our very notions of selfhood, to hear her ask, over and over, what we’re trying to convey when we decide what we look like. (And, in some cases, whether we’re even the ones deciding.) To follow her career is to watch one observant artist take on the same set of questions, again and again, from every angle she can find…. READ MORE HERE

MELHOP GALLERY º7077 EXHIBITION REVIEW 2021 - losing touch

by Teri Barnes

When is a line more than a line? When it connects us through time and space? When it becomes unrecognizable as a “line”? When it becomes just another blip on a screen? These are all possible answers in Frances Melhop’s exhibition Losing Touch at Melhop Gallery º7077.

Through multiple mediums we see how a line can transform into figures, transcend from social media and touching a screen, and tell time in an ephemeral way. Upon entering the gallery we encounter Harvest and Contact, two bodies of work that combine to tell the story of the screen–both virtually and dimensionally. The work in Harvest is made of multi-sized black paintings that have a texture of fingerprints and symbols, words, and emojis that represent the desired effects of living a social media life. We constantly seek approval from known and unknown people to make us feel important and validated. The black-on-black of these works make the viewer shift their angle to see the “language.” Melhop explains these as “the traces we leave both voluntarily and involuntarily throughout the world.” READ MORE HERE

2020 Lilley Museum interview – in the middle of this nowhere – Instagram Live with Vivian Zavatero

Quarantine Sessions, University of Nevada, Reno. (Obscurations, Mourning Piece)

2020 Double Scoop Arts - Matching Picture - Mourning Piece

by Josie Glassberg

There is something long-gone about Frances Melhop’s photographs. As an experimental portrait artist and former high fashion photographer, Melhop is used to working in a medium where comparisons to the real thing come first. No matter how many portraits we’ve seen, our brains want what they want, which is an image of a person that makes visual sense. Melhop has never offered this, and she doesn’t start with her latest work—a cyanotype series titled “Mourning Piece” from her now-postponed MFA thesis. Instead, we get traces—partial people who hover somewhere between memories and ghosts. Second selves we can project ourselves onto…. READ MORE HERE

2018 Double Scoop Arts - Ghosts Mystics and Best Dressed Beasts - Vanish

by Josie Glassberg

Do you believe in ghosts? How about photographic negatives? In her second wave of work following last week’s MFA Review, Frances Melhop gives us both in “Vanish,” her MFA Midway thesis.

Though her images only appear half-materialized as 26 large-scale, hanging photo tapestries, it’s hard to get around the ghosts of girls past, whose likenesses are burned into the cloth. It’s creepy for sure. And it’s uncanny. Closely spaced to limit viewers’ movements through the translucent maze, each life-sized girl looks like someone you’ve seen before—only in period dress and surrounded by artifacts of the late 19th century…. READ MORE HERE

RENO NEWS and REVIEW - Old Town Portraits - Comstock Portrait Project 2017

by Matt Bieker

After leaving her native New Zealand, Frances Melhop spent over two decades as a fashion photographer. She traveled the world, crafting meticulous, dreamy imagery for magazines like Vogue, Marie Claire and Elle. In 2010, she moved to Reno with her husband and experienced a very different kind of culture.

In the barren hills and tiny towns of the old Comstock frontier, she found a new type of inspiration for her work—one bred from the enduring traditions and isolated lifestyles of the people she met there. Now enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at University of Nevada, Reno, Melhop is debuting her newest exhibition, The Comstock Portrait Project.

Since conceiving of the project in 2013, she has captured stark, honest portraits of the residents of towns like Silver City, Gold Hill and Virginia City. The exhibition will feature almost 50 life-sized prints, along with audio tracks of recorded oral histories. RN&R sat down with Melhop in her studio at UNR to discuss the inspiration for her portraits and how she went from creating narratives to archiving them… READ MORE HERE

RENO GAZETTE JOURNAL 2017- Comstock Portrait Project

by Quest Lakes

Since moving to Nevada from Italy in 2010, Melhop has worked with people from Silver City and Dayton in Lyon County, and Gold Hill and Virginia City in Storey County, capturing some of the remarkable faces and places in these historic Comstock communities.

One of several photo shoots Melhop held between 2013-2017 was in Silver City in 2016 while Melhop was a living in Silver City as a guest of the local Resident Artist Program. She invited young photographers from the region to assist at the temporary studio set up in the Silver City School House (community center). Ava Covington, Marielle Toll and Cora Jeffreys were among the assistants capturing behind the scenes photos, greeting photo subjects, helping with studio equipment set up, etc. In return, Melhop spent a day with them at the end of the week-long shoot, assisting them with their own photography projects….READ MORE HERE

NEVADA APPEAL 2016 - Artist in Residence Silver City

by Quest Lakes

"Frances has also been the inspiration for the design of the visiting artist program here in Silver City," said Quest Lakes, director of the resident artist program in Silver City. "While director at St. Mary's Art Center in Virginia City, Northern Nevada Development Authority named Frances 'Innovator of the Year' within a five-county region. The well-deserved award stemmed from her extraordinary work through the Art Center. She introduced new talent to the region, showcased Nevada artists, and found grants and donations for programming, artists and restoration of the historic building.

SILVER CITY ARTIST IN RESIDENCE - Rural retreat

by Kris Vagner

Melhop was there for a six-day photo shoot. Because her lighting and backdrop equipment is far too large for the dome house, she was working in the historic Silver City School House a few blocks down the road.

She was adding to her series of portraits of Comstock residents. She said she wanted to let her subjects’ personalities shine through. Compared with shooting for fashion magazines, she said, “It’s like a whole different headspace.” She sounded downright humbled as she talked about hearing and seeing “super amazing stories, super amazing faces. It’s kind of a mine of amazingness.”

Hence the sleepless nights. Her subjects, after being photographed, were interviewed by filmmaker Mary Works Covington. Melhop plans to include the recordings along with her photos in a 2017 gallery exhibit. After each day of shooting, she’d been listening to them late into the night.

“It’s like another whole eight-hour day of recordings, so I’m listening to them, and it’s just brilliant stuff. The first women who were the firefighters—and some woman who ran herself over with her own car. … I’m laughing my pants off, and I’m crying, and I don’t even know half of these people.”

Visiting artists structure their projects however they like. In Melhop’s case, she was planning to do some mentoring once her shoot wrapped up.

“Tomorrow I’m handing it over to the interns,” she said. “They’re going to work on projects that they want to do. I’m going to teach them lighting skills, how to measure light, how to do a portrait, different ways of lighting.” READ MORE HERE

RENO NEWS and REVIEW – Tip the Scale. Down the Rabbit Hole Exhibition

by Brad Bynum

For the first two years that Frances Melhop lived in Reno, she felt out of place.

“I’ve never been in a place like Reno,” she says. “They don’t seem to value aging. … In Italy, they see the beauty in a building that’s falling apart.”

She was born and raised in New Zealand. She spent 10 years living and working in Australia, honing her craft as a photographer, and then spent the next decade in Italy. While there, she built an impressive resume shooting editorial fashion spreads for European editions of Vogue, Elle and other magazines.

She felt creative freedom and support in Italy. But after marrying a Nevadan and moving to Reno in 2011, she struggled to find a sense of belonging in the community. She had difficulty unearthing Reno’s seemingly buried creative class. In Italy, her favorite pastime had been shooting photographs of the churches and Roman ruins that were thousands of years old. In Nevada, she couldn’t find that connection to history that had fed her muse in Italy.

Until she visited Virginia City…. READ MORE HERE

RENO NEWS and REVIEW - St Mary’s Art Center Director

by Ashley Hennefer

St. Mary’s Art and Retreat Center is housed in a building similar to others in Virginia City. For one thing, the building—formerly known as the St. Mary Louise Hospital—is quite old. It’s also been adapted from its original purpose. Built in 1876, the 137 year-old structure has been renovated and updated several times since then, and has been transformed from a hospital into an international art gallery and artist retreat (“Virginia [City] is for [art] lovers,” RN&R June 6).

“It’s been part of the history of Nevada for a long time,” says Frances Melhop, the new creative director and curator of the center. Melhop, an artist who spent more than 10 years in Italy as a fashion photographer, took over as director in late September.

Some of Melhop’s plans include bringing the facility into the 21st century by “redoing the computer systems” and maintaining an online presence. She’s also working on making the building more functional for artists, turning an open, well-lit room into a print-making station, allowing the darkroom to be kept dark and used only for photography…