Tiziana La Melia

Tiziana La Melia was born in 1982 in the city of Palermo, Italy.

She is currently based in Vancouver, British Columbia, as a practising artist, writer, painter, and poet.

She works within the mediums and intersections of poetry, writing, text, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, collage, performance, and video work.

Her oeuvre thematically and conceptually focuses on the intertwining thoughts she has about female archetypes, the feminine unconscious, auto-fiction, passion, and desire.

Tiziana La Melia was born in Palermo, Italy, which is located on the major island of Sicily.

Her family relocated to rural Winfield, British Columbia, in the Syilx Okanagan territories of Canada, when she was still a young girl.

Having grown up within the context of a multi-lingual family newly settling in Canada, La Melia began her creative endeavours from this very young age.

Inspiration for a growing imagination found her in the form of a fascination with the quotidian.

Creativity, for La Melia, came from observing everyday occurrences.

Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect. is a collection of writings by La Melia that contains writings, scripts, plays, poems, experimental prose, and other forms of creative texts spanning back to the artist's early career in 2005.

In 2008, she received a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from Emily Carr.

After this was achieved, La Melia relocated to Guelph, Ontario, to pursue a graduate degree in Studio Art.

There, she spent time developing her interdisciplinary practise at the graduate level.

In 2011, La Melia received a master's degree in Fine Art, specializing in Studio Art from the University of Guelph.

In a statement from La Melia in an interview with Jacqueline Ross in 2013, she reveals that growing up in a bilingual home let her notice the slippages of language – that is the playfulness of puns or inventive cross-lingual jokes.

These instances became an inspiration to incorporate the use of limitations in language within her artistic practise later in life.

For post-secondary education, La Melia has attended both Simon Fraser University and Emily Carr University of Art + Design (formerly Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design).

These institutions are both located in Vancouver, Canada.

The 2014 exhibition acted as a starting point for the text to be written, as it references many of the same multi-faceted themes such as Greek tragedy, teenage obsessions, the writings of Joyce Carol Oates, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein or Yvonne Rainer.

The act and object of writing is often folded into La Melia's artistic practice.

For example, the titles of artworks are often lines from poems, drafts, or plays.

Sculptures are the remnants of performances, walls are pages, paintings are also windows, and windows are doors.

The work in this show functionally blurs the boundaries between artistic media, collapsing the historical hierarchies between them.

Instead, La Melia's exhibition cohesively glues together histories of the artist's life; including the imagined parts of it.

As the title of the show and book suggests, La Melia is thinking about the presence of absence, and what nuances may spring from these interstitial spaces.

Broom Emotion is a solo exhibition of La Melia's artwork curated by Frank Balland in Paris at Galerie Anne Barrault in 2017.

This show, much like all her shows, takes poetics as the starting point of her artistic process.

In relation to Broom Emotion, Balland describes the invitational image as of a comb gliding through hair as being a central imaginative metaphor for many underlying themes of the exhibition.

“It starts with the comb’s teeth, having streaked the wet hair, greased with the gel agglutinating on the wooden handle, like sticky slobber, thick foam.

There is too much of it, and it leaks from the body, through its lifeless ends, pushed out by the sweep of the hand, both firm and delicate,” says Balland.

Broom Emotion grapples with witches, women with brooms, domestic activities, social relationships, literature, art, cinema, and dreams.

The pigeon looks for death in the space between the needle and the haystack is the first solo exhibition by La Melia at Unit 17 in Vancouver.

The show and artworks come also from a group show, Garden Gossip, at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Canada.

The exhibition contains the artwork ' Self Defense' which refers to inter-species connection and mediation between humans, plants, and animals.

The work is made up of a collection of painted works in basins that are all hung up on striped posts.

Hou describes these paintings as “haiku sized”, which references La Melia's inter-disciplinary approach to art making that takes creative writing texts as central to her practice.

La Melia also enlists water-jet cut mirrors within the installation that serve as a method for viewers to analyze their complicity towards self-identifying with art-objects.

According to Hou, the mirrors play a central role to his reading of the exhibition because their reflections expose the fact that “our complicity with the art-object-becoming-social is embellished with personal vanity in our complicity with the viewer-becoming-more-beautiful.

” The exhibition functions as a spatial poem, where the movements of any viewer may write another passage.

The Eyelash and the Monochrome shares a title with the 2018 text published by Talonbooks in Vancouver.