The Eyelash and the Monochrome

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 relationships, 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 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 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 describe 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 to whom the work pays tribute (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 led by Dodi Bellamy and Kevin Killian at The Apartment Gallery in Vancouver, an earlier version of the 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 naïve 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 trouvé like a vacuum cleaner or a clock or a bale of hay—meshing conflicting modes of thinking produces 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.