Meet Frances Melhop | Artist, Curator & Art Gallery Director

We had the good fortune of connecting with Frances Melhop and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Frances, what matters most to you?
For me art as a mode of communication has always mattered, along with equality, and fair play.

Over the years my main concern was telling women’s stories, from narrating tales with female protagonists in my fashion days, to teaching an art history “Women in Art” and now running a nomadic art gallery that leans heavily toward supporting female artists’ careers and practices.

I guess Ive been deliberately trying to add to the canon to include the incredible stories of women that have traditionally been overlooked in the artworld.

From the start I worked with mainly female editorial teams and crew in the photography studio, collaborating to create empowering characters through fairytale and folkloric stories.

I think it has been an instinctive process from the start, I hadn’t attached the word feminist to it early on as there was such bad connotations to that word originally….although now I feel like the definition has changed and expanded in a positive way.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I work in tactile mediums such as photography, printmaking, hand embroidery, drawing and oil paint. These days each project that I undertake explores varying ways of being human and my own sense of self in the world, embracing imperfection and surprise. For me it is extremely important to retain evidence of the hand in artwork.

In my current work “Common Threads,” I am compelled to work in slow tactile physical mediums reversing out of digital worlds. The series is concerned with figuration, juxtaposing representational and abstracted forms and ideas. I am thinking about the advances for women made by the 60s and 70s feminist artists and how the overturn of Roe versus Wade case in 2022, suggests we might be moving backwards, losing some of their hard-won victories such as control of our own bodies. It is also quite endearing and lovely to be working with the photographs of these women’s bodies who are imperfect, who haven’t visually reconstructed themselves, who haven’t retouched the photographs of their performances, and who were very brave and wonderfully human.

I think a lot about the voluntary and involuntary trails we leave behind, from fingerprints on screens to profiles on social media as we construct our own histories.

Over the last 10 years I’ve been exploring the tensions between our imperfect physical selves and our perfect-able virtual digital personas. I noted also the tremendous backlash young girls faced when they posted photographs online of their bad skin days or the process through teenage pimples and puberty. Disgust and outrage rained down on them. With 3 young daughters living at home at the time, this really bothered me. This kind of negative reaction reinforces the necessity for women especially, to present as unrealistically perfect and at times barely human.

Today living and working through screens, navigating a barrage of visual and aural data without much other sensory information has become the norm – textureless screens inform us, entertain us, track us, prompt us, classify us, map our lives, and broadcast us.

While our physical body is impermanent our digital designed self might very well go on forever. As opposed to traditional historic records, we now write our own histories. Apparently, we have control over what we want immortalized and memorialized or hidden and obscured. Memory and our bodies are so fallible. Coming from a photography background I also begin to wonder if digital images are replacing our memories. Layers and layers of photos piling up on us every day of perfect faces, retouched portraits, staged moments, blurring our real memories and creating false expectations and psychological stresses about how we appear virtually with the physical body unable to keep up with the improvements.

Nomadic Art Gallery Director – Melhop Gallery º7077

Originally a brick-and-mortar, contemporary art space at Zephyr Cove, Lake Tahoe, the gallery has transformed into a nomadic gallery working on various curatorial projects, with a virtual online viewing and art collecting platform. I have created a roving gallery opening exhibitions in alternative spaces, encouraging a new approach to thinking about and interacting with contemporary art.

I represent 12 artists, with a focus on underrepresented female artists, providing support and nurturing their careers. I introduce experienced and fledgling collectors to fresh, diverse, conceptual, contemporary artwork. The artists presented are national, and international, ranging from Lake Tahoe, Nevada to New York, Seoul, Kumamoto Japan, London and Moscow. Through careful research I am curating dynamic guerilla-style pop up exhibitions, while facilitating art installations and studio visits for people to experience art and meet artists in non-intimidating ways. Melhop Gallery also runs a private Artist in Residency program, artists stay at Lake Tahoe, Nevada, by invitation, adding diverse perspectives and culture to the region.

Mission: to support artists, build community, collaborate with institutions, galleries, and other entities, so artists can realize projects in non-traditional spaces, that are more meaningful and relevant to their work. The benefits of not being restricted to only one space are already clear. I can cast a broader geographical net, without being tied to one place, meaning – more exposure for the artists.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Not that I really take many days off ever but…..depending on the season, one of my favorite things to do is to zip up to Mt Rose ski field, put my skis on and doodle around skiing solo around the trees and groomers… no pressure, just taking it easy and looking for that perfect set of turns, half a day is perfect – back to the car for a thermos of tea and meander home to read by the fire.

In the summer I hike on various trails around Lake Tahoe, with a little picnic lunch and friends, just talking and finding balance. If the lake is smooth I take a paddle board out and just paddle around the strange prehistoric looking rock formations that rise out of the water like mini Stonehenges.

When I am in cities, I am full power ahead looking at art, galleries, new shows, studio visits museums, street art, visiting friends, finding incredible food and looking at bizarre juxtapositions of things that just happen in cities with high energy art crowds.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
There are so many people I would like to shout out…. First off – I would have to say my husband Jack Deming has been one of my biggest supporters, best friend, believer in my work and loudest trumpet blower, along with my dear friends Magazine Editor/Stylist Michael Dye and Architect Geert Koster in Italy.

Quest Lakes and Theo McCormick are two of the most community spirited people I have ever met, they have always been an incredible support. They run the wonderful artist Residency program in Silver City, Nevada, in artist Jim McCormick’s geodesic domes that he built in the 60s and 70’s.

Website: https://www.frances-melhop.art/, https://www.melhopgallery.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frances_melhop/, https://www.instagram.com/melhop_gallery/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesjmelhop/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/frances.melhop/, https://www.facebook.com/melhopgallery7077/