Map *
Not Yet
Titled (Drain)
PVC pipe
Not Yet Titled
(Heater)
Heater, speaker, mp3
Bermuda Girl
Flashe, watercolour,
water-jet cut aluminum
No Sweat,
My Pet,
Don’t Fret
Flashe, waterjet-cut
aluminum, LED
tape
Simple, Sincere,
Frank and
Straightforward
Flashe, pastel, water-jet
cut aluminum
Innocent Oyster
Watercolor,
flashe, water-jet
cut aluminum
Thin Bubble Spit
Flashe, watercolour,
water-jet aluminum
A drained fish tank becomes a compositional diagram within which to display
paintings. The paintings’ supports emerged out of angelfish drawings whose
form mutated with extensive material meditation. Other influences to the form
were derivetd from patterns of angelfish on the sleeve of a housecoat, an old piece
of jewelry predating the angelfish pins that became a badge for the members of
Mark Twain’s Aquarium Club.
Towards the end of his life, Twain endured the deaths of his wife and two
daughters, to combat his depression, Twain began to befriend girls aged 1016, daughters of couples he met during trips to Bermuda for his health. He
treated this company as his surrogate granddaughters, and called them his
Angel Fish, after the first fish he saw in the tropics. The exhibition Innocence
at Home uses Twain’s billiard room-cum-aquarium club as a structure.
A prototypical recreation room, the Aquarium Club was where Twain would
entertain his “Angel Fish”. Portraits of his Angel Fish hung in the room
where they would play cards, billiards and read. Innocence at Home was the
name of Mark Twain’s estate briefly before his remaining daughter, Clara,
changed it to Stormfield.
Strawberry thinking
housecoat sketch
Flashe, pastel, water-jet
cut aluminum
Worry Lines
Shoe polish, flashe,
water-jet cut aluminum,
LED tape
Door
*(all works Two Thousand Fifteen)
INNOCENCE
AT HOME
Tiziana La Melia
March 5-April 5, 2015
C
S A
Space
Now you have the time, and light, of day, stay to listen for the water to boil in the next room. In
this one, it’s all dried up. Can you conceive of the distinction between water heating or burning?
Spry tinkling, tining, splashing—a softer demonstration of an energetic outbreak from a docile
state marked by burps or other unfamiliar but likely gaseous consequences. “Ordinary things never
become quite unreal nor disproportionate. It is only an effort to read just, to focus, seemingly a
slight physical effort.” H.D.’s ink splattered 18th century frock, a surface traversing Twain’s clean
three tone white suit on which to draw strawberries, architecture, shells, clothing, frets, smudges,
spit and knotted bows. He described his sartorial inclination this way: “I’ll wear white clothes both
winter and summer….because I prefer to be clean in the matter of raiment - clean in a dirty world;
absolutely the only cleanly-clothed human being in all Christendom north of the Tropics.”
The sound of water boiling is currently understood as alarming. Prior to kettles, water boiling
meant a bath. Now it means get up before the water dries up. A sound eclipsed by an alert; suppose
it’s alarming, suppose it’s dire...“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Feed a Guy or
a Doll. Dates and Dolls. Burrows and Dames, Dates and Kumquat. Words for men and women
adrift in coloured light and cosmetology, all-found adrain (almost the name for a boy or a girl).
“A slender threadlike appendage of a climbing plant, often growing in a spiral form, that
stretches and twines around any suitable support, especially a slender curl or ringlet of hair.”
Unfettered shadows of tendrils tamed by knotted bow keeping her loose hairs afoot, adrain.
Aquarium Club is dried out. Pets are buried. I’m not afraid of drying out. What will replace the
billiard table where is the water water.
No sweat, my pet.
—Tiziana La Melia, H.D, Steffanie Ling, Mark Twain, New Oxford American Dictionary
curated by
Steffanie
Ling