To mark her exhibition at the gallery, Tiziana La Melia invites Lisa Robertson to speak about her literary work.
Born in Toronto, poet and novelist Lisa Robertson learned to write in a community of visual artists and poets in Vancouver, where she lived for 25 years, participating in the collective cultural life of the city. Her work moves across various histories of materiality to address architecture, urbanism, maintenance work and textile tradition. She is formally prolific and works often in the context of the contemporary visual arts, writing essays, poems, scripts and narratives for and with artists, who have included Liz Magor, Amy Sillman, Justine Kurland, Kathy Slade, Moyra Davey and Vera Kox. Current work includes the novel Riverwork, just published by Coach House Books in Toronto, and in collaboration with sabrina soyer, the poetry collection I of Song, translations of the trobairitz poet Na Castelloza, from Nion Editions in Berkeley. She lives in France.
Tiziana La Melia is an artist and author born in Palermo, raised on an orchard-garden in the Okanagan, and lives in Vancouver. She works across many media, including painting, poetry, collaboration, collage, installation, 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 that move through layers of diasporic time.
Earlier in 2026, she wrote a collaborative poem with Christian Vistan for their two-person exhibition Canzone at Unit 17 (Vancouver) and completed a double-sided painting titled I Dream of a Support Flower, on view at the Gordon and Marion Smith Foundation (North Vancouver). Recent publications include the dual-language collection of poetry I Come from a Long Line of People Who Don’t Use Words, edited by Sonia D’Alto (Archive Books, 2025); Glint, edited with Natasha Katedralis—a companion “tabloid” featuring work by artists and writers who participated in the film Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster (Or Gallery, 2025); and Kletic Kink (poetry album with Ellis Sam, 2022).