Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
Or Gallery 236 East Pender Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6A 1T7
Tiziana La Melia, “Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster (still),” 2024
single-channel video with sound (courtesy of the Artist)
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 is one such 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 drawing that expands upon a familiar narrative of migration from the countryside to the city and vice versa. Through the 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 amid an archive of adjacent props and ephemera. The project calls toward the discards of recent nostalgic moments: – Y2K, tabloid magazines, reality TV, leaked celebrity tapes, and the advent of analogue film merging with digital proliferation. In these ways, La Melia’s work mimics the historical depth of fabled stories while a yearning for alternate modes of relating the unrelated.
Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster will be the first solo presentation of the 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.