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Canzone
Tiziana La Melia & Christian Vistan
until 25 April 2026
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Libretto by Claire Geddes Bailey
In these works by Christian Vistan and Tiziana La Melia the logic of the echo or reverberation takes place in which the plastic or visual art object takes form or dialogues with other practices both material and immaterial. In particular, what arises here is the treatment of the art object as an arena for the condensation of thought and systems.
In Tiziana La Melia’s Bag (2026), the form of the calendar acts as a conjunction between the calendar itself as a rational form with which to measure time and the poetics of painting and collaging. La Melia, whose practice also encompasses poetry, takes the calendar — perhaps already marked a priori as a painterly through its similitude to the modernist grid — and saturates it with letters, symbols, and loose compositional elements. Bag is not the product of affixing elements to a singular surface but rather the collapsing of multiple surfaces onto one plane — in this work, this multi-planarity is achieved through repeatedly painting and scanning multiple sheets of a 2025 calendar, before condensing them into the same space. Here, the calendar becomes a site of sedimentation as the above elements are layered onto one another repeatedly and in different registers. This maneuver playfully negates the calendar (and language as a whole) as an efficient and calculated system for the communication of information, rendering it in service of a playful opacity and mediation on form and the limits of transmitting meaning. Concurrently, the work never fully abandons the task of measuring the passing of time — birthdays, day-to-day tasks, and other events are marked. But here, via formal layering, the passage of time is not presented as a linear succession of one-after-the-other but as a process of aggregating.
In Christian Vistan’s Backs (2026), several sheets of unmounted manila sheets have been assembled together into a mattress-like form through a series of folds. Marked by its own kind of grid from the pre-folded paper, this work is awash with muted yellows with two circles marking the center. The logic of the reverb here is concretized through the layering of remnants of other materials, gestures, and works; the circles and waterstains being products of a painting on the verso. This work furthers Vistan’s mode of thinking across object categories and the way in which material accumulates and transforms over time. Accumulation (at the level of material), here, being the aggregation of marks, traces, and repeated acts of re-appropriation — in a sense, a structure akin to language in the ways in which all these systems of communication are subject to similar forms of abstraction as they move across the vector of time. Backs simultaneously draws from Vistan’s observation of their grandmother’s habit of patching together bits of textile in order to transform them into other objects and recent experiments in paper-box making. In this example, Backs draws from a fitted sheet sewn by their grandmother, a reference further underscored by four pillowcase-sized collaborative paintings by Vistan and La Melia also on show. Collectively titled My, Night, Your, Day (2025/2026), these yellow-pigment soaked canvases are marked by fleeting traces of linear quasi-grid forms and language. My, Night, Your, Day furthers a formal exploration of the calendar while drawing attention to the ways in which material can function as a kind of time measurement through mark-making and the accumulation of material.
These varying meditations on the structures of meaning and time-keeping are bound together by a poem jointly composed by the artists called Canzone playing off of FM alarm clocks in the room. The poem emanating from the alarm clock (which builds off past work from La Melia in which apparatuses of sound or light are rendered into sculptural objects) poses as a dematerialized counter point and thread binding these works together through its verbal articulation of themes which run throughout the works on show. Revolving around the thematic centrifuges of “day, night, bed, mattress, calendar”, Canzone ruminates upon the ways in which the passage of time is marked; through day-night cycles, relationships with others, (mundane) events, and impressions left on materials.
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Tiziana La Melia is an artist and author born in Palermo (IT) and raised on an orchard-garden on Syilx/Okanagan territories. She works across many media such as painting, poetry, sculpture, collaboration, collage and drawing. In her writing and art practice, La Melia gleans the detritus of the everyday and transmutes it into material textures, and iterative shapes and symbols, which move through layers of diasporic time. She has exhibited at the Or Gallery, Vancouver; The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver; Romance, Pittsburgh; Pilot, Vienna (all 2025); Kamloops Art Gallery, Mécènes du sud, Montpellier (2021); Kamloops Art Gallery, Kamloops; Bad Water, Knoxville (all 2024); Grande Prairie; Lucas Hirsch, Dusseldorf; Griffin Art Projects, North Vancouver (all 2019); Damien & the Love Guru, Brussels; Galerie Anne Baurrault, Paris (both 2019/17); Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre (2017); Oakville Galleries; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Vancouver Art Gallery (all 2016); Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles (2015) and Mercer Union, Toronto (2014). She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and an MFA from the University of Guelph. In October 2022, Tiziana released Kletic Kink, a poetry album with musical compositions by Ellis Sam. Her latest book of poetry, titled I come from a long line of people who don’t use words, was released by Archive Books in June 2025.
Christian Vistan is an artist from Morong, Bataan, Philippines, living on unceded xwmÉ™θkwÉ™yÌ“É™m, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and sÉ™lÌ“ílwÉ™taʔɬ territories, colonially known as Vancouver, British Columbia. In their practice, they gather materials and motifs from personal, familial and migrant histories and construct forms that intersect, misidentify and relate affect, language and experience. They work across painting, poetry and collaboration, often collaborating with other artists, writers, curators, and their relatives. Recent projects include Wawa Walk (2013/2025), a photographic installation that was part of Patience, a five month long rotating exhibition at joys curated by Danica Pinteric; and Kiss Part Two, a collaborative group exhibition between Christian, Aubin Soonhwan K and Nadya Isabella at Hearth–both in Tkaronto in 2025. They hold a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and were a 2024-2025 Fellow at 221a in Vancouver.
Claire Geddes Bailey is a writer and baker based in Tkaronto. She is co-curator of the reading series Café Sprinkle. She holds an MFA in creative writing from University of Guelph and makes cake as Spool Oven.
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