Losing Touch

Artist statement

Losing Touch consists of several bodies of work in various mediums exploring presence and absence in real and virtual spaces. It engages with tensions present in and between communication, self-hood and control. The project originates in recollections of the intensity of childhood sensory perception and the diminishment of that intensity as a result of the augmentation of those perceptions with photography, screens and virtual spaces. The promise and lure of these technologies of the self, attract more and more of our attention, time, and connection, to the detriment paradoxically of physical human interaction and material states such as sleep and self-care.

Losing Touch

 Exhibition Essay 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.”

 Contact utilizes a series of hands in different positions related to how we use our phone screens. Melhop relates these hands as, “the gestures we make while using our phones and devices look more like caresses from our angle but from the point of view of the screen, they are confronting, aggressive types of gestures.” The sterile white of the hands adds to the coldness of this aggressive touch and the height of where the hands are mounted invade the viewer’s space as if they are about to touch us. The hands are all casts of Melhop’s own hand, making visible the literal work of “the artist’s hand” in the artwork. She says she thinks “about the human value of touch, and that working by hand, producing artifacts born of touch as a process, involves time and slow contemplation.” Both of these bodies of work speak to how involved we are in our screen and how we leave both visible and invisible marks behind. Melhop says, “the promise and lure of these technologies of the self, attract more and more of our attention, time, and connection, to the detriment paradoxically of physical human interaction and material states such as sleep and self-care.”

 With Times Table Girl, two silk fabric pieces hang in front of a projection of a young girl (she is also printed on the silk) reciting her times tables for the viewer. The video is both sincere and vulnerable, with a stutter here and there as the numbers keep growing and growing. This work also speaks to the passage of time, making us think about learning in school and how the lessons of our past can so easily be forgotten.

Melhop’s newest work involves using blind contour drawings as inspiration and fuel to bring new life to her past use of tintype photographs of Victorian girls. Whispers Across Time… takes the images of the girls from those tintypes and re-envisions them as both embroidered, drawn, and mono printed forms. The embroidered figures have their own room in the gallery – stitched onto British linen, they are both fragile and ethereal. Using the blind contour method of drawing, Melhop abstracts the original figure making the young girl seem “old” yet still young at the same time. She says this effect seems to “unravel age.” By drawing with vanishing ink, Melhop had to work fast to complete the stitching which changes the contours of the drawings again in this intricate process. We can see traces of recognizable features through the abstractions – eyes here, distorted feet there. There is almost a Picasso-like twist to how the bodies form together. On its own is a stitching of Melhop’s own Father, a sweet gesture of family portraiture using this abstracted method.

 Similar to these stitched works are another iteration of the blind contour figures in another room of the gallery. These works on paper take the inspiration from tintypes again – this time linking the subtle colors of the surface of the emulsion on metal as you shift the plate, to using muted colors of gouache paint as the backdrop for the figures. Melhop says by using these different methods of re-creating the Victorian girls from the tintypes, she is getting at the “essence” of the tintype girls. They are still related to photography – Melhop’s original art-making method, yet dig deeper into the meaning behind the “portrait” and how it was supposed to capture the soul of a person.

In the hallway linking these two bodies of work are monotype prints with bright fuschia-colored dresses and blind contour figures embodying them. Melhop is thinking about the “Empty Dress”– how the style, iconography, and meaning behind this article of clothing can speak volumes. The backgrounds of the dresses and figures are multiple layers of color – mimicking the thin veil of silk from her previous pieces. This newest work comes from Melhop’s recent time spent at the “In Cahoots” Artist Residency. She says she is “loving drawing again, as well as printmaking and photography.” She is finding surprises in the new work she is making and is inspired by both artists represented by the gallery (the fiber works of Stewart Francis Easton and Karen Hampton) as well as local artists (the drawings of Wes Lee and prints by Nolan Preece).

All of these bodies of work create a conversation about the figure – both real and imagined, and how we reveal ourselves to the world. We knowingly and sometimes unknowingly allow ourselves to be framed in a certain light and are transformed by the responses we receive. The through line from self to civilization can be as simple as a fingerprint or as complicated as an abstracted drawing. Melhop brings all these lines together to tell a compelling story of the visual connections of past, present, and future and how we translate them.

 Harvest

Artist statement

Harvest is a series of black oil paint on panels at a variety of sizes from 4” x 4” to 20” x 100” Words become visible on the panels only from certain angles as the viewer moves past them. Harvest addresses modes of communication and the traces we leave both voluntarily and involuntarily throughout the world. The paint texture alludes to fingerprints on screens, to tracks, traces and marks.

Our identifiable fingerprints from touch and human residues are only part of the involuntary, detectable trails we make. Only when the screen is switched off do we see the very human traces that remain.

We touch our screens more than any human around us, from our angle the touch looks like a caress, from the screen’s point of view it is more of a confronting aggressive gesture.

The words painted relate to how our vocabulary is reduced, limited to over simplified clicks, emojis and likes. Communication data about us and our preferences is harvested for future purposes, raising questions about our privacy and selfhood, both physical and virtual.

CONTACT

Artist statement

Contact is a series of resin castings of my hands in texting gestures. Each hand points towards the viewer from a wall.  Each fingertip that would be texting is flattened against an invisible screen. The hands are imperfect and have immensely detailed skin, fingerprints, nails, and wrinkles. They are a strange off white non-human color.

The gestures we make while using our phones and devices look more like caresses from our angle but from the point of view of the screen, they are confronting, aggressive types of gestures. We make contact through screens, human touch is lost on a technological barrier between us and our communicant. I think about what it must look like to the screen, do we appear to be trapped in a small space while it can traverse the digital universe in microseconds? Does it consider it is free? How restricted it must think our physical body is.

As our world becomes faster and faster, we can in some ways become out of touch, in all meanings of the phrase. Physical interaction becomes awkward and embarrassing, thinking must be on the fly, without enough time to process meaning. Paradoxically while supermarket check-out people want to know what we are doing on the weekend and it irritates us that it is none of their business, we confess our deepest tragedies to unknown identities on the internet.

Public and private domains are blurred.

Our human fingerprints and faces are registered through and by the screen, identifying us digitally, logging us in to our private information, while harvesting that same information for other purposes. Privacy is a questionable concept under these circumstances. What actually remains private as we publicly sow images and information to the virtual and real world?

I think about the human value of touch, and that working by hand, producing artifacts born of touch as a process, involving time and slow contemplation. In working as physical artists we are registering our selves into the work.

Timestable Girl

Timestable Girl

Artist statement

This short film plays with ideas of how we receive, remember and transmit information, traditionally and technologically. It gestures at how technology enhances but diminishes our need to develop a healthy memory. Times Tables Girl is symbolic for me, of the rituals and steps of traditional learning and prowess, signifying rites of passage as a child, such as learning to write, memorizing your times tables for immediate recall, and solving sums in your head. The devices in our hands begin to replace our memory and the necessity to work things out in the brain.

She stands as if floating in a void of black. She recites the times tables from 1 through to 12. The footage of her entire times tables is projected onto a sheet of silk suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the gallery space.

Times tables Girl’s voice marking time can be heard throughout the space, connecting all of the other bodies of work which also denote modes of communication, imagining time experienced in different ways and its relevance to our lives.

The occasional mistake she makes emphasizes the quality of endearment and grace to be found in imperfection, that humanize her performance and remind us of our strange expectations for velocity, accuracy and precision in everything now.

whispers across time…

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 stitched 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 vanishing ink, to a stitched drawing. 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 stitched drawings.

Each evolves like a whisper across time….

SHORT BIO

Frances Melhop is a photographer and visual artist, 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. With a primarily lens-based practice, she works in photography, stitching, printmaking, and oil paint, exploring portraiture and ideas of communication, selfhood and control.