TIZIANA LA MELIA
Recent exhibitions and books include The Eyelash and the Monochrome (Talonbooks, 2018), and Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect (Blank Cheque Press, 2019); Global Cows 2020 on Conceptual Fine Arts and hosted as part of Images Festival, (Toronto, 2021; Ozone Gleaners at Projet Pangee (Montreal), 2020; Fly Robin Fly at Mecenes du Sud (Montpellier, 2021); 17:4 at Unit 17 (Vancouver, 2021); Comics Trip! at Collection Lambert (Avignion), 2022. Her poetry and criticism has been published in The Capilano Review, Art 21, C Magazine, Montez Press, The Organism for Poetic Research among others.
email me: tizlahoney@gmail.com
Represented by Unit 17 - Vancouver and Anne Barrault - Paris
website under construction
Tiziana La Melia is an artist and author born in Palermo (IT) and raised on an orchard-garden on Syilx/Okanagan territories. She works across many media such as painting, poetry, sculpture, collaboration, collage and drawing.In her writing and art practice Tiziana gleans the detritus of the everyday and transmutes it into material textures, and iterative shapes and symbols, which move through layers of diasporic time. Over the past few years, they have been editing a video that features friends and family performing the simple life in a fabled drama between hamsters and mice, travelling between the rural and the urban, while tracing familial and symbolic understandings of food, clothing, and place. Tiziana also made Kletic Kink (with Ellis Sam), a poetry album with musical compositions. She is a sessional instructor in painting and writing at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
"Time dissolves inside this book. Just a small warning, if you have somewhere to go, and enter Tiziana La Melia's poetry, you will arrive very late. This book astonishes, breaks your ears away from poetry you have known. It leaves us stranded in the most glorious possible ways."
-CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death
"Artista/Poeta indexes soaring rents in the “baby city”, observes “weaponized floweriness is the model twirling scarcity”, then moves through other terrains, physical or immaterial. Crossing the border between image and text, the border between nation states, the border between sign and meaning, the border between body and world—a body that was lost then found—La Melia’s The Eyelash and the Monochrome is hyphen is dash is blur, is liminal permeable mutable dwelling."
- Mercedes Eng, author of Prison Industrial Complex Explodes
128 pages | Pub. Date: 2018
6 W × 9 H × .75 D inches
Combining visuals and text, this collection of poems travels through territories as varied as daily and domestic activities; social relationships; literature, cinema, and art; as well as dreams, as it moves between the page and the exhibition.The Eyelash and the Monochrome asks: what happens when material becomes thought and thought becomes object? At once a book of poetry and an artist’s book, it gathers together poems, performance scripts, and parallel texts, illustrating the hybrid nature of these texts and trespassing upon the boundaries of genre. It is a book about enmeshment, about the potentiality of interplay. It is a conversation. It is not linear, but it interrogates and explores the line: lines of text, lines of dialogue, socio-economic lines drawn or crossed, lines that were the trails of snails … Everything is a signifier, meaning is elastic, and references are multi-faceted.
La Melia’s multivalent and generative practice lives in process; it thinks through materials (paint, objects, non-human forms) with violent sentimentality, excessive desire, naiveté, narrative construction, and an awareness of the body and memory.This collection comes out of friendship; it is for other poets, artists, or for anyone interested in ecology, communication, contradiction, displacement, subjectivity, memory, art, reading, and writing. It is comfortably uncertain, contradictory, and reflective. In defiance of order, La Melia’s haptic writing is as a riddle inquiring after our environment and our attempts to situate ourselves within our uncertain time. The Eyelash and the Monochrome meshes conflicting modes of thinking to produce a collage of thought through the body, through the material, and through slippages of language.
