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Thursday, 27 Mar 2025 at 6:30 pm

The Cinematheque, 1131 Howe Street, Vancouver

RSVP / Tickets

Film Screening: Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster

  • Maggie Groat

    Artist
    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. 

    Read More

  • Joan Jonas

    Artist

    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.

    Read More

  • Tiziana La Melia

    Tiziana La Melia (b. 1982) is a Vancouver-based artist and writer. She was born in Palermo, Italy, and raised on a rural farm in Winfield, BC. Her work is known for its ability to dissolve distinctions between painting, sculpture, performance, poetry and installation, and for creating evocative and complex narratives that move between language and form, the written and the visual. La Melia completed her BFA at Emily Carr University and her MFA at the University of Guelph. In 2014, she was a writer-in-residence at Gallery TPW, Toronto, and that same year won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. La Melia’s poetry and images have been published in C Magazine, The Organism for Poetic Research, West Coast Line, Capilano Review, Agony Klub, Charcuterie, Moire, Art 21 and The Interjection Calendar. She is the author of three books, lettuce lettuce please go bad (Talonbooks, 2024), The Eyelash and the Monochrome (Talonbooks, 2018) and a collection of her writing and poetry, Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect: Selected Writings (Publication Studio and Blank Cheque Press, 2015/18). La Melia has exhibited at Magasin III, Stockholm, Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels, François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, Galerie Division, Montreal, Mercer Union, Franzkaka and Cooper Cole, Toronto and the Vancouver Art Gallery, CSA Space, the Apartment, Western Front and Unit 17, Vancouver.

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  • 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.

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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 Belkin, Or Gallery and The Cinematheque, the evening is an opportunity to share La Melia’s work in the cinema, connecting to its iterations in two concurrent exhibitions: Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital at the Belkin (9 January-13 April 2025) and Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster at Or Gallery (6 February-10 May 2025) in dialogue with works by Groat, Jonas and Stewart.

As the characters in La Melia’s film Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster (2023/24) 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 Vancouver’s Chinatown. 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 1976 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 (beer/wine)

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@allery.org or belkin.rsvp@ubc.ca for details.

 

Image (above): Tiziana La Melia, Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster (still), 2023. Courtesy of the artist

  • Maggie Groat

    Artist
    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. 

    Read More

  • Joan Jonas

    Artist

    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.

    Read More

  • Tiziana La Melia

    Tiziana La Melia (b. 1982) is a Vancouver-based artist and writer. She was born in Palermo, Italy, and raised on a rural farm in Winfield, BC. Her work is known for its ability to dissolve distinctions between painting, sculpture, performance, poetry and installation, and for creating evocative and complex narratives that move between language and form, the written and the visual. La Melia completed her BFA at Emily Carr University and her MFA at the University of Guelph. In 2014, she was a writer-in-residence at Gallery TPW, Toronto, and that same year won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. La Melia’s poetry and images have been published in C Magazine, The Organism for Poetic Research, West Coast Line, Capilano Review, Agony Klub, Charcuterie, Moire, Art 21 and The Interjection Calendar. She is the author of three books, lettuce lettuce please go bad (Talonbooks, 2024), The Eyelash and the Monochrome (Talonbooks, 2018) and a collection of her writing and poetry, Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect: Selected Writings (Publication Studio and Blank Cheque Press, 2015/18). La Melia has exhibited at Magasin III, Stockholm, Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels, François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, Galerie Division, Montreal, Mercer Union, Franzkaka and Cooper Cole, Toronto and the Vancouver Art Gallery, CSA Space, the Apartment, Western Front and Unit 17, Vancouver.

    Read More

  • 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.

    Read More

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