Exhibitions

TIZIANA LA MELIA: COUNTRY MOUSE CITY MOUSE HAMSTER

Bad Water / 320 E Churchwell Ave. June 7 - July 7th

Tiziana La Melia

Late Summer 1999/2021 - 10 days in the country scurrying around to become a film crew while shooting fully saturated on tape. I slept on the floor beyond a minimally sound proofed door to steal my energy back from my 15 year old self at film camp not sleeping and making three films in one week. The embarrassments of youth are beautiful when you remember how devotional and desperate they needed to be before becoming embarrassing later on. Because the intricacy of our past desire was almost erased by magnets accidentally placed too near the tape and they are getting older and need to be baked back onto themselves. If those images were replicated in each of us feeding back exquisite tones the everyday magic of cooking and wearing clothes would become a spell to wake up an ancient feeling so potent it tunnels back through our belly buttons and overcomes all dread and complaint and lack of awe to play flutes for a pair of angels dancing in a bugs eye.

The bestial friends persisted beyond extermination. A mouscapade in 2003 where the cat/parasite hunts while wearing a clown collar and is forced to play instead of kill. Pigweedstemwildroot is brewed for a spell in the ditch, fallen, rotten, directed, she is tossing up interchangeable mice.
Time’s pumping bellows reviewed a moon in a cows eye. Solanaceae is a potency to soothe with the sun.
Trying our moments to live like episodic spirals inside a stale dated bless you tape with audible zooming jumpcut to:
“feels so good”
hair in the eyes
“so nice”
obscura edit

I like doing this <3
with friends of care somersaulting back into the earth :0

in fear - I detect changes in my environment
in anxiety - I prepare for the future
in confusion - I know there’s too much going on around me
in panic - I protect when my life is in danger
in joy - I experience bliss and connection
in sadness - I let go of things that are no longer working
in disgust - I become a self
in envy - I access resources and attention
you will die and everyone you have ever known

will die
your toes
will die
the innocence of experience
converting hay to a beast

the experience of innocence
I know there’s too much going on around me - let me look forward to the future
of being here
where are we going?
in the fry of everything that can be given voice to
adolescence
is like the dumb of a body getting ready to speak
or the intelligence of the octopuses many limbs splitting open to reach
for intimacies’ bliss and connection
our degenerate ancestors of bumbums waiting inside mother’s loom tangled children for numnums
ums
devoted to consumption
ums
consumed by devotion

(we inspect each others folds for ticks)
we spec each other
awash
in acid
faded
lines
of borders unenforceable
release
from the drive to
produce

– Kasper Freyer

Tiziana La Melia is a artist and writer born in Palermo (IT) and raised on Syilx territories and currently working on the unceded territories of the səlilwətaɬ, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm. Tiziana’s writing and art practice gleans the detritus of the everyday and transmutes it into material textures, and iterative shapes, sensation, symbols, which move through layers of diasporic time. Recent activities include teaching painting and writing at Emily Carr University and publishing a book of poetry that parallels activities in painting, collaboration, sonics, gardening, matter and grieving—titled lettuce lettuce please go bad (Talon Books April 2024). Recent exhibitions include confessions on sparkling hill at damien and the love guru (Zurich, 2023); C U at Dreams Comma Delta (Delta, 2023); Fly Robin Fly at Mecenes du Sud (Montepellier, 2021)

Kasper Feyrer was born in lək̓ʷəŋən Territory, and now lives and works on the unceded territories of the səlilwətaɬ, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm. They root their practice in an embodied engagement with celluloid filmmaking and sculpture, with emphasis on the body’s relationship to these media. They conceive of the camera as a bodily extension of the human sensorium — a device through which one can feel time and perception, and thereby aid or alter one’s experience of the world. Feyrer graduated with a Meisterschülerin from the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany in 2010, and received a Bachelor of Media Arts, Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in 2004.