The Eyelash and the Monochrome

Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt has written about the active intelligence of language; for La Melia there is no distinction between the different forms or objects, everything is a signifier. References are multi-faceted, from Greek tragedy, teenage obsession, the writings of Joyce Carol Oates, Mark Twain, or Yvonne Rainer, the personal and incidental, to female icons throughout history and in the present, pushing and pulling different directions. Writing is often the starting point, from poem to script to play. Poetry lines become the titles of visual-art pieces, transforming the written word into the physical space of the gallery, or walls become pages, unfolding narratives populated by objects and materials. The exhibition is a space in which hierarchies collapse, theater, poetry, writing, mythological female figures, personal narratives and popular culture are combined and meaning becomes elastic in form. Transmutability lingers throughout the work, in a photographic collage, Surface Instruction (2011), a worn apron becomes an over-sized handbag while a twin table with pink glass emerges and recedes as Janis Joplin's rose-tinted glasses in Aquarium Club Console (Janis) (2014). And yet underlying, sometimes playful juxtapositions are historical instances and trajectories. Live snails drawing on plastic speaks to the use of their shells in making the color purple for women-only manuscripts, becoming in and of itself purple prose. -Georgina Jackson, Director of Exhibitions & Publications, Mercer Union, Toronto The potentiality of interplay manifests in the exhibition title, The Eyelash and the Monochrome. The line, a cursor with connotations of femininity and luck, is adjoined to the blank canvas. Rather than painterly in reference, it implicates the presence of absence, spaces in which there is potential for new narratives to be created. -Georgina Jackson, Director of Exhibitions & Publications, Mercer Union, Toronto This book is a delight -The Ormsby Review