In her writing and artistic practice, Tiziana La Melia brings together a plurality of material approaches to trace the ways in which overlapping encounters of place come to shape individual identity and the potentials for community connection.

Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster, also known as The Simple Life, is a roving exploration of the amorphous space between the defining contours of rural and urban life. The exhibition includes a survey of video, performance, sculpture, painting and drawings that expand upon a familiar narrative of migration from the countryside to the city and vice versa. Through the tall tale of two anthropomorphized mice, an episodic journey unfolds. Traversing multiple geographies and time scales, the auto-fictional characters trace familial and symbolic understandings of food, shelter, and belonging—blurring rural and urban chronicles while daylighting the interconnected landscapes as a site for support, nourishment, and healing.  Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster features an ongoing episodic film that deploys an eccentric cast amidst an archive of adjacent props and ephemera. The project calls towards the discards of recent nostalgic moments past—Y2K, tabloid magazines, reality TV, leaked celebrity tapes and the advent of analog film merging with that of digital proliferation—mimicking the historic depth of fabled stories with a yearning for alternate modes of relating the unrelated.

Country Mouse City Mouse is the first solo presentation of several newly commissioned artworks within the fabled drama series and will include expansive outreach programming with a diverse range of performances from collaborators within the local artistic community.