Special Event
Glint Performative Reading with Kiel Torres, Christian Vistan, and James Albers
22 February 2025
2:00-3:00pm
Still from publication , 2025. Image courtesy of Natasha Katedralis and Tiziana La Melia.
Please join us for a performative reading with artists Kiel Torres, Christian Vistan, and James Albers. Performances will feature readings from Or Gallery’s most recent publication Glint a collaborative magazine edited by Natasha Katedralis and Tiziana La Melia.
This public program is presented in conjunction with Tiziana La Melia’s exhibition Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster, on view at Or Gallery from February 6 to May 10, 2025.
Participant Bios
James Albers
James Albers (they/he) is an emerging artist, curator, writer, organizer, performer and drag artist based in Vancouver on the stolen and ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəyəm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ First Nations. In their recent endeavors, James is thinking through subjects like queer fantasy, sci-fi, virtuality, digitization, futurism, poetics, nostalgia, humour, embodiment, and spirituality. They are interested in exploring the queer potentials of revisionist histories and choose to believe in the magic of fiction. Recently, James has been thinking through the truth that a perfect lie may hold, and vice versa. They graduated from the department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, with a double major in Visual Arts and Art History. During their final year, they were the Assistant Director of the Hatch Art Gallery, UBC’s only student-run art space.
Tiziana La Melia
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, Tiziana gleans the detritus of the everyday and transmutes it into material textures, and iterative shapes and symbols, which move through layers of diasporic time. Over the past few years, they have been editing a video that features friends and family performing the simple life in a fabled drama between hamsters and mice, travelling between the rural and the urban, while tracing familial and symbolic understandings of food, clothing, and place. In October 2022, Tiziana released Kletic Kink, a poetry album with musical compositions by Ellis Sam. Her latest book of poetry, titled lettuce lettuce please go bad, was published by Talon Books in April 2024.
Kiel Torres
Kiel Torres is a writer, editor, and curator based in Vancouver, Canada. Her work focuses on performance, poetry, criticism, and correspondence.
Christian Vistan
Christian Vistan is an artist from Morong, Bataan, Philippines, living on unceded xʷməθkʷəyəm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ territories. Their artwork gathers materials and motifs from personal, familial, and migrant histories and narratives, bringing them together into hybrid forms that intersect, misidentify, and relate affect and language across painting, poetry, and collaboration. In particular, they think about the materiality of water in relation to painting and the experience of distance and diaspora, and collaboration and poetry as a way to articulate a sense of place and one’s positionality. Recent projects include ‘HOHOL (Hang Out Hang Out Lang)’ (2024), a multisite exhibition and series of programs dedicated to Filipino contemporary art practices and identities that they co-curated with Patrick Cruz and grunt gallery across Vancouver; ‘Rice Cooker’, a performance, forthcoming book project, and collaboration with Kiyoshi Whitley, originally performed at Boombox (Vancouver) in 2023; and ‘dreams comma delta’ (2020-2023), a bedroom turned gallery space that hosted artist projects and exhibitions inside their family home in Ladner, BC, that they ran and co-curated with Aubin Soonhwan K. They are currently a fellow at 221a (Vancouver), where they are learning how to make books and running a press as a year-long performance tentatively called ‘The Past’.