Screening
Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster: Film Screening
27 March 2025
Tiziana La Melia, Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster, 2024, Film still, Courtesy of the artist.
Please join us for a screening that brings together works by visual artists Maggie Groat, Joan Jonas, Tiziana La Melia and Krista Belle Stewart to interrogate an urban/rural entanglement in terms of land and culture. Tiziana La Melia will be present to introduce her work.
Co-presented by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Or Gallery and The Cinematheque, the evening is an opportunity to share Tiziana La Melia’s work in the cinema, connecting to its interations in two concurrent exhibitions: Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital at the Belkin (Jan 9-Apr 13, 2025) and Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster at Or Gallery (Feb 6-May 10, 2025) in dialogue with works by Groat, Jones and Stewart.
As the characters in La Melia’s film Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster (2023/2024) take up the movement from the city to the country, the film uses satirical elements of celebrity and Y2K culture, particularly Reality TV, to consider how this long-held dichotomy is viewed through a lens of contemporary popular culture. As the perpetually wild hamster disrupts the classic fable of a town mouse and country mouse changing places, La Melia’s film complicates an understanding of a strict division of land and culture, framed within histories of immigration, extraction and value.
Krista Belle Stewart’s work is founded on her Spaxomin land and asks questions of the archive and cultural ownership. This Spaxmn iteration of Potato Gardens Band was produced in 2018 as a dispatch between Stewart’s home territory and 221A’s Pollyanna 圖書館 Library located in Chinatown, Vancouver. The piece has had various iterations in intersecting personal, familial, and cultural memories. For this site specific performance, while on her territory land, Stewart transmitted a live feed from her phone to a pubic audience in Vancouver. The phone relayed the audio of a speaker system playing a 1918 wax-cylinder recording of Stewart’s great-grandmother Terese Kaimetko singing ‘Potato Gardens Band’ songs back to the land where they were composed.
Joan Jonas’s 1974 work I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances) contends with observation, perception and fantasy, playing with narrative in the new (at the time) medium of video. This work takes up a geography of displacement and desire, using performance and video to explore ways of seeing and the authority of objects and gestures. Intercutting scenes of the Cape Breton countryside with images of a studio set-up in New York City, Jonas edits herself as the protagonist, narrator and audience, watching the image of a screen within a screen.
Maggie Groat’s short video work Vegetables is made from found still images and references television advertisements, instructional videos, psychological experiments, and guided meditations to promote the consideration, growth, and consumption of vegetables. It was commissioned for the 2024 Mighty Niagara Film Festival.
Program
6:30 pm – Reception
7:00 pm – Introduction
7:10 pm – Spaxmn version of Krista Belle Stewart, Potato Gardens Band
7:30 pm – Joan Jonas, I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances)
7:55 pm – Intermission
8:05 pm – Maggie Groat, Vegetables
8:08 pm – Tiziana La Melia, Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
9:08 pm – Conversation and Audience Q&A with Tiziana La Melia
For tickets, visit The Cinematheque. There are limited number of complimentary tickets available; email or@orgallery.org or belkin.rsvp@ubc.ca for details.
Participant Bios
Maggie Groat
Maggie Groat is an interdisciplinary artist based in Niagara region of Ontario, the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, Chonnonton, and Anishnaabeg. Working exclusively with found imagery and salvaged and sustainable materials, her work explores the utility of images and the transformative, ritual potential of reuse while living in times of climate emergency. Her recent and ongoing project S LOWER F, is a sprawling examination of attempts at slowness as a form of refusal and the radical potentials of small, quiet acts.
Joan Jonas
An acclaimed multimedia performance artist, Joan Jonas is also a major figure in video art. From her seminal performance-based exercises of the 1970s to her later televisual narratives, Jonas’s theatrical portrayal of female identity is a unique and intriguing inquiry. Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the mid-1960s. In works that examined space and perceptual phenomena, she merged elements of dance, modern theater, the conventions of Japanese Noh and Kabuki theater, and the visual arts. Jonas first began using video in performance in Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), in which a live camera and monitor functioned as both a mirror and a masking device, a means of transforming and layering images, space and time. Her classic early works, including Vertical Roll (1972), explore the phenomenology of the video medium — its one-on-one directness and function as a mirror — to create a theater of the self and the body. In 2015, Jonas represented the US in the 56th Venice Biennale. Her installation for the five galleries of the United States Pavilion, They Come to Us without a Word, was commissioned by the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Jonas also created a new video performance, with music by Jason Moran (They Come to Us without a Word II, in conjunction with her installation for the US Pavilion at the Biennale.
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.
Krista Belle Stewart
Krista Belle Stewart (Syilx Nation, b. 1979) is a visual artist and citizen of the Syilx Nation currently based in Berlin and Vienna. Stewart works primarily with video, photography, sculpture and performance, drawing out personal and political narratives inherent in archival materials while questioning their articulation in institutional histories. Her work has been shown at solo exhibitions at Goethe Institute Seattle (2021); MOCA, Toronto (2020); Nanaimo Art Gallery (2019); Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2019); Teck Gallery at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver (2018) and Mercer Union as part of the 28th Images Festival, Toronto (2015). Group exhibitions include Kunstverein in Hamburg (2021); Eva International, Limerick (2021); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2020); CTM Festival, Berlin (2020); ISCP, Brooklyn (2017); Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal (2017) and Vancouver Art Gallery (2016). Screenings and performances include Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2022 and 2017); MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, Manhattan (2021); UnionDocs, Brooklyn (2019); 221A, Vancouver (2018) and Plug-In Institute, Winnipeg (2017). Stewart’s work is currently part of Galerie Barbara Thumm’s online platform New Viewings. She is an MFA graduate from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY and is presently a PhD in Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria.