A huge thank you to curator Maria Sorensen for making this happen, to On Curating Project Space, and to The Nevada Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts who partially funded this project.

Frances Melhop

solo exhibition

Curated by: Maria Sorensen

Vernissage: 2 May 6-9 pm
Artist Talk: 2 May 6.30 pm
Aperitivo gathering: 4 May 6-9 pm
Finnisage: 10 May 6-9pm

EXHIBITION DATES: 2-10 May (visits other days by appointment, contact: maria.sorensen@zhdk.ch)

ADDRESS:
DIENSTGEBÄUDE ART SPACE
Töpferstrasse 26 Zürich 8045
Switzerland

tender material

CURATORIAL STATEMENT by Maria Sorensen

In her landmark 1990 book Sexual Personae, feminist researcher and writer Camille Paglia used intellect to analyse art, history, and literature from classical times to the 19th century and argue that it is men who are the weaker sex because they have remained eternally powerless over their desire for the female body. It is female sexuality, she argued, that is humanity’s greatest force. Her tome helped catapult feminism beyond ideology of victimhood.

Tender Material reflects on impermanence, memory, fragility, being human and acknowledging our material physicality versus our lives through the screen. Treading a tightrope between women’s work, craft, and art, Frances Melhop’s human-size hand stitched series, Common Threads is a tribute to feminist artists who used their bodies as material creatively and artistically to break down barriers, taboos, restrictions, oppressive systems, and ideologies.

Simple pressure prints of dresses are overlaid with embroidered contour drawings of female bodies. Each dress has stories and memories attached to it, held within it.

Melhop’s delicate and tender textile and paper works highlight the interplay between fragility and toughness, exterior and interior, using nakedness and vulnerability as powerful tools of resistance.

Frances Melhop is a multidisciplinary visual artist born in Christchurch, New Zealand, living and working at Lake Tahoe, Nevada. She works in tactile mediums such as photography, printmaking, hand embroidery, sculpture and oil paint questioning and framing her perceptions of the world. Frances is an award-winning photographer with a decades long career in fashion photography conceptualizing, and directing shoots for Vogue Pelle Italy, Vogue Gioelli, Italy, Vogue Australia and Elle Portugal. She holds MFA degree from University of Nevada, Reno, and has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide.

Maria Sorensen is an independent art curator, writer, and researcher. Combining her experience of growing up in an authoritarian country with her background in Film and Visual Arts, her curatorial practice focuses on highlighting important societal issues using strong and powerful artistic language.

She writes for Index on Censorship Magazine covering cultural and political issues and has previously worked for various film channels curating a World Cinema program. Having lived and worked in London, Copenhagen, and Tokyo she is currently based in Zurich, Switzerland where she collaborates with Zurich Film Festival.

She has a BA in Linguistics and a CAS in Curatorial Practice from Zurich University of Arts.