Tiziana La Melia The Eyelash and the Monochrome

Circles and Sequences: Lis Rhodes and Elisabeth Subrin

SPACE: Giles Round

Please join us on Friday November 28th for the opening of three new exhibitions at Mercer Union. At 7pm there will be an artist talk by Tiziana La Melia followed by the opening reception.

After 10pm join us across the street at Holy Oak Cafe, 1241 Bloor Street west for drinks and guest mixes.

Tiziana La Melia The Eyelash and the Monochrome

Tiziana La Melia weaves writing, sculpture, painting and performance in layered installations which speak to female archetypes, personal narratives, passions and teenage desires. Exploring the potentiality of slippages between language and form, her work seeps between figuration and abstraction, in all senses of the terms.

In this new body of work a series of sequences are presented; hanging photographic collages, a metallic and purple bed and screens, while paintings are no longer windows but doors, and a line drawn along the gallery wall to stretch and physically push ones limits. The potentiality of playful 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.

Tiziana La Melia b. Palmero IT received her MFA from the University of Guelph in 2011 and BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2008. Recent exhibition venues include Macaulay & Co. Fine Arts, Vancouver; The Apartment, Vancouver; Xspace, Toronto; Western Front, Vancouver, and SBC Galerie, Montreal. La Melia's writing has appeared in Night Papers V, Bartleby Review, Setup Magazine, Millions Magazine, Pelt and West Coast Line among others. La Melia is the 2014 winner of the RBC Painting Competition. She lives and works in Vancouver BC.

Circles and Sequences: Lis Rhodes and Elisabeth Subrin

Taking its cue from the name of the first British organization to distribute women artists' film and video works co-founded by key experimental feminist filmmaker Lis Rhodes in the 1970s, this series of film screenings engages with questions of representation, politics, language and perception.

Friday 28 November Saturday 13 December 2014

Lis Rhodes Light Reading 1979

B &W;, 16mm transferred to video, 20

Tuesday 16 December Saturday 10 January 2015

Lis Rhodes A Cold Draft 1988

B & W/Colour, 16mm transferred to video, 30

Tuesday 12 January Saturday 24 January 2015

Elisabeth Subrin Shulie 1997

Black and white, B & W/Colour, video, 36 30

Lis Rhodes fuses political intent with material means to question the ideological underpinnings of the language of cinema, culture, society and politics. Her films have been screened internationally since the 1970s. Recent exhibitions include; Light Magic, The Tanks, Tate Modern, London, Dissonance and Disturbance, ICA, London solo both 2012. She lives and works in London, England.

Elisabeth Subrin received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute, Chicago. Her award-winning work has been exhibited widely including solo screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Vienna International Film Festival, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Harvard Film Archives, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and in group exhibitions, film festivals and museums internationally including The Whitney Biennial, the Guggenheim Museum, The Walker Art Center, The New York Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Select recent exhibitions include; Damage Report, ICA, Philadelphia, 2014, solo; Lost Tribes and Promised Lands, Vox Populi, Philadelphia solo 2013; Anti-Establishment, The Hessel Museum at Bard College, Henceforth and Forever Free, The Haggerty Museum of Art both 2012; Neighbourhood, The Mattress Factory Art Museum, Pittsburgh, Shulie: Film and Stills, The Jewish Museum, New York all 2011; Elisabeth Subrin: Compulsion to Repeat, Sue Scott Gallery, New York solo; Greater New York, PS1 and MOMA, New York all 2010. A Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and the Sundance Institute fellow, Subrin lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches in the Film and Media Arts Program at Temple University.

SPACE: Giles Round

Mercer Union has commissioned British artist Giles Round for the second billboard project at the corner of Bloor Street West and St. Clarens Avenue.

Giles Round looks to the language of modernism to explore the history of ideological positions that proposed methods for new modes of living and production, and the influence these have had on how we live in the present. His works trace alternative histories of British modernism those that are often overshadowed by the canonical modernist narrative and particularly those relating to the decorative or domestic. As such, his work encompasses sculpture, architecture, typography, furniture and functional objects.

Giles Round b.1976, London lives and works in London, England. Recent exhibitions include Commons Room, Grizedale Arts at Anyang Public Art Project Biennial, Anyang, South Korea, 2014 collaboration with Grizedale; Hey, Im Mr Poetic, Wysing Arts, Cambridgeshire, 2014 group.