“losing touch” opens + October artist news

We are happy to announce the opening of Losing Touch by Frances Melhop
The exhibition runs from 20 October – 2 November 2021.

CLOSING RECEPTION SATURDAY 30 October 4-6pm
Looking forward to seeing you!

installation view detail of “Losing Touch”

"LOSING TOUCH"

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.

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.

ARTIST NEWS

INTRODUCING A NEW ARTIST TO OUR GALLERY - JENNIFER GARZA-CUEN

We are so excited to welcome Jennifer Garza-Cuen to our band of artists!
She writes of her practice;
"I am a photographer, and my relationship to images has framed my adult life. My projects come from a place of autobiography, utilizing fine-art documentary and tableau traditions, process-based techniques, archives, found materials, and text to explore themes that have marked out my life: American myths, place and placelessness, home and transiency, exploration and loss, identity, inheritance, being both 'of' and 'othered', as well as the photographic medium and process itself."

SHORT BIO

Jennifer Garza-Cuen is an artist from the Pacific Northwest. Currently Assistant Professor of Photography in the Department of Art + Design at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, she received her MFA in photography and MA in the History of Art and Visual Culture with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her BA summa cum laude in comparative literature was completed at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Garza-Cuen is the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Photography, the Robert Rauschenberg Residency Award, and the British Journal of Photography and 1854 Media’s Female in Focus Award. Additionally, she has received fellowships to attend residencies at Light Work, Ucross, Oxbow, Hambidge, Brush Creek, and the Vermont Studio Center. Public collections include Light Work, The Do Good Fund, the New Mexico History Museum and The Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and published in contemporary photographic journals such as Dear Dave, Contact Sheet, Musée, Papiers Paris, Blink, PDN, NR Magazine UK, Der Greif Germany, The Photo Review, and Conveyor as well as on-line journals such as: i-D, Feature Shoot, Aint-Bad, Fubiz, iGNANT, Dazed, and Juxtapoz. Garza-Cuen’s forthcoming monograph, Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg, in collaboration with Odette England will be published by Radius Books summer 2021.

Jennifer Garza-Cuen, portrait by Asa Gilmore

Untitled - Girl with Snake, Rabun, GA, from the ongoing series Imag[in]ing America

Untitled - Ranch Hand, Buffalo, WY, from the ongoing series Imag[in]ing America

Imag[in]ing America


ARTIST STATEMENT

Our society treats place as a central identifying characteristic, second only to name and followed closely by profession. We all have a catalogue of images in our mind that we call upon when a city, town, or country's name is mentioned and those images help us to form an opinion of place, and those we meet from there. 

What is it that makes us ‘of’ a place? As a former American expatriate and one who has lived my adult life essentially placeless this is a central question in my work. In my ongoing project Imag[in]ing America, I am interested in investigating national, regional, and local identities as well as ideas of otherness as they relate to place and documentary photography in America. 

Photographs have the ability to expand and compress time. They speak of what was, what is, and what will be. We look to photographs to remember and often reenact what we see, pushing old images into the future. Imag[in]ing America depicts a series of locations in the United States as a residue of cultural memory, an inheritance. It is a metaphorical memoir, a narrative re-telling of facts and fictions and a discovery of the dreamland that still is America.

Jennifer Garza-Cuen will be showing at the Melhop Gallery º7077 in March/April 2022, her latest news includes Paris Photo!

November 2021: Jennifer will be doing a book signing with Radius at Paris Photo of her collaborative Monograph with Odette England.

Museum Exhibitions:

Solo Exhibition of collaborative project: Past Paper // Present Marks at the Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi (Scheduled for Fall 2022)

Talks:

Saint Lucy Conversations: November 1st, 2021 Aurora Photo Book Talk "Past Paper // Present Marks" (10.21.21)

Recent Group Exhibitions

Critical Mass

Museum of South Texas Faculty Exhibition

Installation view of Future / Past: Photolucida’s 2019 Critical Mass Top 50

MORE ARTIST NEWS

KELLY POPOFF

A new series of work by Kelly Popoff titled "A Memoir"
50 paintings in the installation, each 11" x 11" oil on paper.

Kelly also is participating in a group show an upcoming show at Artyard - in New Jersey. The head curator and founder, Jill Kearney, discovered Kelly's work on instagram and invited her to exhibit in a show called "Invisible"

GALEN BROWN

Galen has been quietly working on some exquisite small drawings...

Untitled Small Waves 2021, 5' x 7" ink on museum board, mounted on aluminum, mounted on wooden frames

MIYA HANNAN

Miya currently has a solo exhibition titled "Aerial" in Poughkeepsie, New York. The works are sanded chairs and soot drawings. Miya draws painstakingly with the soot from candle smoke and an upside down drawing block suspended from the ceiling.

JULIA SCHWADRON MARIANELLI

Julia is juggling her art practice, several exhibitions, her children, Art Mother podcast and teaching! Here is a sample of what she is up to:

A Room of Their Own - Women Artists of the Sierra
Confidence Firehouse Gallery, Arts & Culture of El Dorado, Placerville, CA,
September 30 - November 28, 2021

"Fireweed" acrylic ink on paper 19.5” x 13.3”

Trembling Grass / Vibrating Grass, solo exhibition
Oats Park Art Center, Fallon, NV,
August 14 - November 13, 2021

Upcoming workshop:

Life Drawing in Nature
Atelier in Reno
Julia Schwadron Marianelli
October 23rd, 2-5pm

EUNKANG KOH

Eunkang has been cooking up some batches of soft sculpture for her upcoming show "I Dream Donuts" in the Brandstater Gallery, at the La Sierra Gallery, Riverside, California.

Detail, Donuts, soft sculptures, screenprinted fabric, installation of 80 donuts across a 15 foot wall

JEAN BRENNAN

News, artwork, and videos produced from Jean's studio include; Twisties and Intergalactic Naval Gazing....

Twisties, double-sided risograph print with collage and prose written in response to an intimate encounter with Japanese knotweed., 8.5 x 11”

Intergalactic Naval Gazing, collaged image and lyrical essay mix science, historical and personal accounts to describe foraging and processing spacefaring Umbilicaria mammulata lichen into dye. 8.5 x 14”

FROM THE FLATFILES

Leilani, Paris, 2009, 1/3, edition of 3, Giampiero Assumma, photograph analogue film, digital image printed on Epson archival fine art cotton rag, 1300

contact frances@melhopgallery.com for more details




For visits contact frances@melhopgallery.com to make an appointment, or keep an eye on our website homepage, Instagram or Facebook for open days.

Thank you to everyone who has been supporting and visiting the gallery during these odd and unusual times, we look forward to seeing you at the reception on 30 October!

Happy Halloween/Samhain!

Frances

Follow us on Instagram or Facebook as the new gallery progresses and see what the 13 artists have been up to.

The gallery will continue to operate by appointment, with some open hours on Saturdays, (keep an eye on instagram and facebook or the site home page for open day announcements)
We are very happy to open for individual or group visits.
Please let us know if you would like to schedule a gallery visit on a weekday or a weekend.

Email: frances@melhopgallery.com

www.melhopgallery.com

210 Elks Point Rd, Zephyr Cove, Lake Tahoe, Nevada 89448