The Eyelash and the Monochrome

Description:


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 clichés 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