Tiziana La Melia — Bad Water

County Mouse City Mouse Hamster, installation view

County Mouse City Mouse Hamster, 2023/2024, digital film shot on DVCAM

>Knock Knock Poem, 2024
steel (salvaged door knobs), buttons, ribbon, watercolor on handmade buttons, confetti flowers, photographs, laminated magazine cut-out, polyester (dress), willow charcoal and leather paint on kitten heel shoes (kitten healer)—costumes from the film.

Knock Knock Poem, detail

Knock Knock Poem, detail

Knock Knock Poem, detail

Knock Knock Poem, detail

Glint, 2024
rhinestoned poem on denim and ribbon, hamster wheel, birdcage, balloon weights, motor, resin, paper, jute, grommets

Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
Tiziana La Melia
June 6-July 7, 2024

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.

Audrey Gair
Rind

opening November 22, 2024

Phyllis Baldino, Max Guy & Ellie Rae Hunter
Outliners
October 4 - November 10, 2024

Elly Reitman
energy
August 16 - September 20, 2024

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie
The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica Pinteric
July 12 - July 29, 2024

Tiziana La Melia
Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
June 7 - July 6, 2024

Jacob Jackmauh, Caitlin McCann & Benjamin Stallings
As for me, I’m just passing through this planet
March 8 - April 14, 2024

Irina Jasnowski Pascual
Wipers
September 15 - October 29, 2023

Coco Klockner
honesty
July 8 - August 6, 2023

Morgan Canavan, Ben Estes, Marisa Takal
More Coming Back & More Returning
May 5 - June 11, 2023

Sylvie Hayes-Wallace
Center of the Universe
August 5 - September 18, 2022

Amanda Horowitz
Bad Water, True West or Between Myself the Crickets and the Coyote
performed by Sophia Cleary and Ada Friedman
July 14 & July 15, 2022

Suzanna Zak
Coming Home to the Ice Age
opening May 13 - June 24, 2022

★

About
Instagram

★

open by appointment

located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica PintericJuly 12 - July 29, 2024 Tiziana La Melia Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster June 7 - July 6, 2024

★ About Instagram ★open by appointment located beside320 E. Churchwell Ave Knoxville, Tennessee

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie
The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica Pinteric
July 12 - July 29, 2024

Tiziana La Melia
Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
June 7 - July 6, 2024

★

About
Instagram

★

open by appointment

located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee