The Eyelash and the Monochrome

(Paperback)

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Vancouver-based La Melia was the winner of the 2014 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, but painting is just one of the mediums she employs. First and foremost, she is a poet. The poetic path followed by La Melia travels through territories as varied as daily and domestic activities, social relationship, literature, cinema, art or dreams. She is not set on any particular medium, using the opportunities given by a still or moving image, drawing, painting, sculpture or performance, in order to embody the different aspects of her relationship with her material and symbolic environment. Writing, a process which on the one hand releases the self-fictional character of this work, and, on the other hand, allows the birth of new potentialities to determine things, appears, as far as it is concerned, as the architectural frame supporting the whole creative work. Continuing with research recently presented in Broom Emotion (chapbook 2012, exhibition in paris 2017), where "stories of witchcraft, farmyards, domestic rites mingle with vapourous comical ageless kitsch" this new collection of poems continues to describes the residue of cosmetologies and fates marbling with sweat and tears on shimmering streaks in ponds and other cinematic clichs like the hopeful rainbow in puddles or giving weeds a chance. This collection takes as a starting point a poem in progress printed on a set of single "bed spreads" displayed in Tiziana's exhibition The Eyelash and The Monochrome at Mercer Union in 2014. Ideas for the work come from various conversations, with poets and artists with whom the work plays tribute to (for example, Ada Smailbegovic, Nestor Kruger). The writing works through the struggles of how to gain agency when you hit up against the limitations, the margins of domestic space, class, sexuality and other limits. Lot (2013) foreshadowed Eyelash, where during the Poets Theatre Festival lead by Dodi Bellamy and Kevin Killian at The Apartment Gallery in Vancouver, an earlier version of text appeared as Lot Potpourri in collaboration with Julian Hou and performers/writers Andrea Actis and Emily Fedoruk. Lot, eyelash, and brooding snails emerge out of spam, neck spasms, survival, rumours and nave misunderstandings that mutate as edges of thought and feeling (not necessarily linguistic) turn to form. When material becomes thought and thought becomes object a streak of paint, or an objet trouv, like a vacuum cleaner or a clock or a bale of hay, meshing conflicting modes of thinking to produce a collage of thought through the body, through the material, and through slippages of language. Following no order, this haptic writing is a riddle that describes the effort to articulate an environment at the edge of its own forgetting, trying to place oneself amidst the sentimental violence of uncertain times.

Reviews

Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt has written about the active intelligence of language; for La Melia there is no distinction between the different forms or objects, everything is a signifier. References are multi-faceted, from Greek tragedy, teenage obsession, the writings of Joyce Carol Oates, Mark Twain, or Yvonne Rainer, the personal and incidental, to female icons throughout history and in the present, pushing and pulling different directions. Writing is often the starting point, from poem to script to play. Poetry lines become the titles of visual-art pieces, transforming the written word into the physical space of the gallery, or walls become pages, unfolding narratives populated by objects and materials. The exhibition is a space in which hierarchies collapse, theater, poetry, writing, mythological female figures, personal narratives and popular culture are combined and meaning becomes elastic in form. Transmutability lingers throughout the work, in a photographic collage, Surface Instruction (2011), a worn apron becomes an over-sized handbag while a twin table with pink glass emerges and recedes as Janis Joplins rose-tinted glasses in Aquarium Club Console (Janis) (2014). And yet underlying, sometimes playful juxtapositions are historical instances and trajectories. Live snails drawing on plastic speaks to the use of their shells in making the color purple for women-only manuscripts, becoming in and of itself purple prose."Georgina Jackson, Director of Exhibitions & Publications, Mercer Union, Toronto

The potentiality of interplay manifests in the exhibition title, The Eyelash and the Monochrome. The line, a cursor with connotations of femininity and luck, is adjoined to the blank canvas. Rather than painterly in reference, it implicates the presence of absence, spaces in which there is potential for new narratives to be created. Georgina Jackson, Director of Exhibitions & Publications, Mercer Union, Toronto

"This book is a delight"The Ormsby Review

Author Bio

Born in Italy and currently living on unceded Coast Salish territories, Tiziana La Melia is the author of Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect: Selected Writing (Publication Studio, 2015), and the chapbook Broom Emotion (2012). Recent solo and collaborative presentations of her work include The pigeon looks for death in the space between the needle and the haystack, LECLERE Centfare d'art (Marseille, 2017); Broom Emotion, galerie anne baurrault (Paris, 2017); Innocence at Home, CSA (Vancouver, 2015); Johnny Suede, Damien and the Love Guru (Brussels, 2017). In 2014 she was a writer in residence at TPW Gallery (Toronto) and the winner of the 2014 RBC Painting Competition Prize.