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. 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.

Education 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. 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. 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. The exhibition contains the artwork ' Self Defense''' which refers to inter-species connection and mediation between humans, plants, and animals. 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 text was originally published in 2016 as Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect. Selected Writings 2005–2015 by Publication Studio in Vancouver, but was republished in 2018 by Blank Cheque Press with additional texts and an updated foreword by the artist.

Selected solo exhibitions Table of Contents (Accompanying Poem). Toronto, Canada. 2011. Neck of Thirsty Flower. Exercise, Vancouver, Canada. 2012. Lot. The Apartment. Vancouver, Canada. 2014. The Eyelash and the Monochrome. Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada. 2014. Innocence at Home. CSA Projects, Vancouver, Canada. 2015. Broom Emotion. Galerie Anne Baurrault, Paris, France. 2017. The pigeon looks for death in the space between the needle and the haystack. Unit 17, Vancouver, Canada. 2018. Pet Parasite. Franz Kaka, Toronto, Canada. 2019. Saint Agatha’s Stink Script. Galerie Anne Baurrault, Paris, France. 2019. Rust Daughters, Say It With Flowers. Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, Grande Prairie, Canada. 2019. Ozone Gleaners. Project Pangee, Montreal, Canada. 2020. Palermo Microonde. Villa Vertua Masolo, Commune di Milano Nova, Italy. 2020.

Awards and residencies

2014 RBC Canadian Painting Competition (National Winner) La Melia was selected as the national winner above fourteen other finalists of the 16th Annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition, a title which is also accompanied by $25 000 purchase prize of her artwork. The work which was selected and purchased is entitled Hanging On To the Part, which moved the jury because of the work's use of abstraction and narrative to portray the mythology of feminine archetypes as well as personal narratives – all within the formal qualities of the painting. The Sobey Art Award is an annual award that celebrates Canada's most exciting young artists and provides heavy financial support to the winners. The top prize winner receives a $100 000 award, each of the shortlisted artists receive a $25 000 award, and the longlisted artists receive a $2 000 award. This award is one of the most impactful awards for young contemporary artists in Canada, and provides much visibility and publicity for both the artists as well as the Arts in an international context. The show was concerning the feminine unconscious of the spaces and histories of the Peace Region of Northern Alberta. Specifically, La Melia explores the relationship of Euphemia McNaught and Evy McBryan and their impact on the historical artistic community of the region. With these histories as inspirational research for the show and artworks, La Melia produces Corduroy Road'' which uses the technique of frottage and rubbing to transfer the indexical history of the space into La Melia's own practise. The act of frottage becomes a writing tool. It is an imprint of time and space that unveils the hidden language of the unwritten, the unread, and the still to be written.

Listed notable awards and residencies 2008 Mary Plumb Blade Award 2008 JackPine Press Publishing Grant 2010 SSHRC, Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Scholarship 2014 RBC Canadian Painting Competition (National Winner) 2014 TWP Writers in Residence 2014 Mountain School for the Arts, Los Angeles 2015 Sobey Art Award Longlist Recipient (West Coast & Yukon) 2017 Triangle Residency, Marseille, France 2017 Brink Award Short List 2017 Contemporary Art Society Emerging Artist Short List 2019 Art Gallery of Grande Prairie Artist Residency