Tip the scale

For the first two years that Frances Melhop lived in Reno, she felt out of place.

“I’ve never been in a place like Reno,” she says. “They don’t seem to value aging. … In Italy, they see the beauty in a building that’s falling apart.”

She was born and raised in New Zealand. She spent 10 years living and working in Australia, honing her craft as a photographer, and then spent the next decade in Italy. While there, she built an impressive resume shooting editorial fashion spreads for European editions of Vogue, Elle and other magazines.

She felt creative freedom and support in Italy. But after marrying a Nevadan and moving to Reno in 2011, she struggled to find a sense of belonging in the community. She had difficulty unearthing Reno’s seemingly buried creative class. In Italy, her favorite pastime had been shooting photographs of the churches and Roman ruins that were thousands of years old. In Nevada, she couldn’t find that connection to history that had fed her muse in Italy.

Until she visited Virginia City.

“This place is brilliant,” she says. “I just completely love it. I can’t get enough. I’m just drawn to it. There’s some strange energy in these hills. I always feel 100 percent here.”

Her connection to Virginia City was anchored at St. Mary’s Art and Retreat Center, a surreal hospital-turned-arts-center on the eastern edge of the mountain town. She stayed there last winter and forged such a deep connection that she’s now the center’s creative director. In addition to Melhop’s current exhibition there, the center also presently boasts artworks by some of the area’s better known artists, like Edw Martinez and Erik Holland.

But the “kooky oldness,” as she calls it, of the building seems to fit especially well with Melhop’s work. Her exhibition, Down the Rabbit Hole, is a retrospective spanning the last 15 years.

The works are large-scale prints of photographs—many originally done as magazine fashion shoots—depicting fantastical images that draw heavily from the iconography of well known fairy tales and fantasy stories like “Snow White,” “Thumbelina” and Alice in Wonderland.

“Poison Apple” depicts two hands: one that looks very old, with long red fingernails, and another that looks young, slender and very pale. Suspended midair between the two hands, as if dropping from the old to the new, is a heart-shaped apple. It’s a clear allusion to “Snow White.” Both hands are bedecked with jewelry—unlike most of the images, which were originally for editorial photos, this one was for a jewelry ad. With the familiar iconography and glossy production value, the works have appealing, broad accessibility.

Melhop attributes her interest in fairy tales in part to growing up in the fantastical realm of New Zealand, where, she says, she spent her time “lying under trees, eating marmalade toast and reading.”

She has a few upcoming projects: She’s the creative director of a new fashion company, Privato Inc., based out of New York, and she’s doing a series of portraits of Nevada artists, starting with some of the artists associated with the annual Nada Dada art event.

Thumbelina is an especially important, recurring figure in Melhop’s work because she likes playing what she calls “the game of scale”—juxtaposing large and small. Human models often appear in miniature settings. In “The Wishing Tree,” for example, a girl in a fashionable red coat appears to engage in the Japanese custom of hanging a written wish on a tree, but the tree is actually a Bonsai tree blown up to the scale of a willow—or has the girl been shrunk down?

And yet, though the senses of scale and perspective are skewed, everything seems in place, at home.