Whisper portrait 9, monotype by Frances Melhop

SHORT BIO

Frances Melhop is a visual artist, curator and gallery director, born in Christchurch, New Zealand, now living in the USA. She has worked globally in the fashion industry as a photographer, constructing imagery; conceptualizing, shooting, and directing stories for publications such as Vogue Italy editions, Vogue Australia, Elle Portugal, and Marie Claire Italy.

In 2009, Luerzer's Archive named Melhop one of The World’s 200 Best Advertising Photographers for the images she created for the campaign of Descamps, France. In 2014 she was awarded the NNDA Comstock Innovator of the Year Award for her arts and community work at St Mary’s Art Center, in Virginia City, Nevada.

Melhop’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide. She works in photography, stitching, printmaking, installation and oil paint, exploring the tensions between the virtual and physical ways we experience the world.

Melhop has taught Photography, Printmaking, Drawing, Art History (Women in Art), Introduction to the Arts, and Visual Foundations at University of Nevada, Reno, WNC, TMCC in northern Nevada. She completed her MFA at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA.

In 2020 she opened the contemporary art gallery, Melhop Gallery º7077, at Lake Tahoe, Nevada representing 12 national and international artists, while guest curating exhibitions around the west of the USA.

WHISPERS ACROSS TIME

Artist Statement

As children we would sit in a circle and start the whisper game.
Each child would whisper what they heard to the next child, by the time it reached the end of the circle the whisper had changed beyond recognition. These works are the visual equivalent.

 The image of each girl transitions through various processes, to become another translation of a portrait. The pathway goes from living person, to a photographic fragment a record of their existence, to a scanned file, to a computer screen, to a blind contour drawing in ink, with oil paint intervention, to a monotype print.

I am reaching for the essence of the subject through deep observation.

All the elements of the whisper game exist in these pieces - transformation, surprise, amusement, and wonder. An entirely new image appears in the form of a monotype.

Each evolves like a whisper across time….