The Un-Familiar

Detail from Roaches and Flowers: War in the Home

This exploration of a psychological crisis is in fact a visual narrative of conquest, where gender politics and violence against women become visible through the vocabulary, iconography, and mechanisms of the home interior. Domestic items such as cutlery and plates, intermingled with flowers and nails, form roaches and other unseemly insect-like forms. These roaches, sometimes camouflaged or constructed with flowers, represent invasion, the unwelcome, the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, found in a space associated with familiarity and comfort.

In Late 2007 Jaime Lee Loy began working with the domestic space as a site of war, intimately exploring the psychological crisis that occurs, when something familiar becomes suddenly unfamiliar.

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