Rust Daughters Say It With Flowers
Tiziana La Melia
Rust Daughters Say It With Flowers
May 30, 2019 - October 27, 2019
Sometimes God comes to earth disguised as rust, chewing away a chain link fence or mariner’s knife. From up close we must seem clumsy and gloomless, like new lovers
– Kaveh Akbar, Soot (2017)
Rust Daughters Say It With Flowers connects the feminine unconscious to the accumulation of works and objects, from the past and present. Visitors to the gallery, whether conscious of it or not, wander through spaces dedicated to the memory of Euphemia “Betty” McNaught (1902 – 2002) and Evy McBryan (1911 – 1985). Their work was germinal in the establishment of an artistic scene in the Peace Region.
The artworks produced for this exhibition cultivate a history that is either well-worn or leaves its mark through the sedimentation of time, overgrowth, decay and rust. Corduroy Road, an artwork created during Tiziana La Melia’s Artist Residency at the Euphemia McNaught Homestead, uses the technique of frottage to create a rubbing, a print that serves as an index to the cracking concrete foundation of the small bedroom where Euphemia once slept. For La Melia an artist, writer and poet, the act of frottage serves as a writing tool, an imprint that speaks to the language and importance of the unwritten or unread and still to be written. The heritage building that once stood on the grounds no longer exists but the faint traces of the life lived there still exist on its concrete blueprint.
Corduroy Road references the construction of a timber trackway used to level muddy ground and create a path forward. Despite the hardships of laying the foundations of their own ‘corduroy roads’ there is a germinal seed within the feminine unconscious which is passed down and across generations of women artists.
Artist in Residence: May 30 – June 27. This Artist in Residence with the artist Tiziana La Melia, it is our first partnership with the Euphemia McNaught Homestead Society. Working in installation, textile fabrication, painting, video, poetry and performance she will present newly commissioned and existing work in the Gallery.
Photo: Joseph Hartman, The Artist’s Studio, Tiziana La Melia (2016)
This exhibition was curated by Derrick Chang
This exhibition is brought to you by:
About The Artist
Tiziana La Melia (b.1982) lives and works on unceded Coast Salish Territories/Vancouver, she is an accomplished artist and author. Early in her career she received national recognition for her work by winning the RBC Painting Competition in 2014. La Melia studied English Literature at Simon Fraser University and completed courses in textile design at Capilano College as well as a Bachelor of Fine Art from Emily Carr University and a Masters of Fine Art at Guelph University.
She has participated in artist residencies such as the LA Mountain School in Los Angeles (2014), Parc Saint Leger (2015), at Triangle, Marseille, (2017) and at the Banff Centre (2016/2017) where she produced the beginnings of a large scale installation as part of the exhibition Garden Gossip (2017). La Melia is the author of The Eyelash and the Monochrome (Talonbooks, 2018), a collection of poems titled after an exhibition of the same name at Mercer Union, Toronto in 2014 as well as, Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect, Selected Writing 2005-2018 which had a second printing in 2018 with Blank Cheque Press. Other exhibitions include Ambivalent Pleasures, The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver (2016-17); Down to Write You This Poem Sat, Oakville Galleries, Oakville (2016); The Pigeon Looks for Death in the Space Between the Needle and the Haystack, Unit 17, Vancouver (2018); St. Agatha’s Stink Script, galerie anne baurrault, Paris (2019); Global Cows, Damien and the Love Guru, Brussels (2019); Nature's Way, Cooper Cole, Toronto (2017); Domestic like a Pre-raphaelite brotherhood, Truth and Consequences, Geneva (2017); Enter the Fog, The Rooms, Newfoundland (2016); Down to Write You This Poem Sat, Oakville Gallery (2016); the poets have always preceded, Griffin Art Projects (2019). Her writing has appeared in places such as Art 21, Public, The Organism for Poetic Research, The Capilano Review, Charcuterie, C Magazine, West Coast Line, The Interjection Calender and AgonyKlub and Tripwire.
Tiziana in Studio Photograph: Joseph Hartman
