Tiziana La Melia is an artist and writer born in Palermo (Italy) who grew up in an orchard on the Syilx/Okanagan territories in southern British Columbia, Canada. She works across many media such as painting, poetry, sculpture, collaboration, collage and drawing. In her writing and art practice, Tiziana gleans the detritus of the everyday and transmutes it into material textures, and iterative shapes and symbols, which move through layers of diasporic time. Over the past few years, she has been editing a video that features friends and family performing the simple life in a fabled drama between hamsters and mice, travelling between the rural and the urban, while tracing familial and symbolic understandings of food, clothing, and place. Tiziana also made Kletic Kink (with Ellis Sam), a poetry album with musical compositions. She is a sessional instructor in painting and writing at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Oscillating between representations and abstractions, her works explore the potentialities of language, intertwining the genre of autofiction and a broader thought on the female archetype. Her works have recently been shown in personal exhibitions such as «Broom Emotion» at the galerie anne barrault (Paris); Ambivalent Pleasures at the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver); Innocence at Home at CSA Projects (Vancouver); Domestic Like a Pre-Raphelite Brotherhood at Truth and Consequences (Geneva), Johnny Suede, Damien and the Love Guru (Brussels); In the Land of Skeletons at the Schwaz Gallery (Schwaz); The Eyelash and the Monochrome at the Mercer Union (Toronto); Lot at The Apartment (Vancouver), Neck of Thirsty Flower at Exercise (Vancouver), Truth & Consequences (Geneva).
Tiziana La Melia has also participated in group exhibitions at Parc Saint Léger, outside the walls, in Nevers, at the Oakville Galleries, at the Gallery Division in Montreal, at the Mint Project Space in Columbus, at the Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles. Her poetry and critics have appeared in the Art 21, The Interjection Calender, CMagazine, Agony Klub, The Organism for Poetic Research, The Capilano Review, The LA Art Book Review and West Coast Line magazines. In 2014 she won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. In 2018, she published two books of poetry published by Talonbooks entitled The Eyelash and the Monochrome and Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect published by Blank Check Press. In 2021, she took part in a group show at the Unit 17 gallery with Ravi Jackson and Tania Willard. In 2023, she was showcased in a duo show at Damien & The Love Guru gallery in Zurich as part of the Confessions On Sparkling Hill exhibition with Alison Yip.
