The Unfamiliar

WHAT NEXT?

2010-07-19T06:48:00.000-07:00

Trinidad born artist Jaime Lee Loy is producing a video entitled 'What Next?' in response to a call for videos by the Guggenheim museum. The museum in collaboration with 'You Tube' is focusing not on the 'now', but on the 'what next?.' This exhibition highlights access, contemporary work, and a rejection of hierarchical structures as their core focus. However, artists from US sanctioned countries are listed as non eligible countries.

This five - 8 minute video (tentative) will blend experimental techniques with a documentary style, towards a conversation between artists on boundaries, access, territory, identity, artistic censorship, and political barriers. It will be a mixture of artists from Trinidad, Cuba, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma, Iran, Jordan, United States, Canada, England, (list is growing) as well as a mixture of artists who reveal their identity and some for their own protection, who will keep their identities concealed. Writers were also welcomed to submit prose or short verse.

This video is in its forming stages.

This video is a direct discussion that asks the question’ What Next?' Rather than ask it in a technological or 'innovation based' context, it is asking the question with regards to the ever-evolving mediums and contexts within which art itself operates, and the negotiations artists consistently maneuver in relation to politics, to commerce, culture, and censorship.

Ironically, most of the artists in this video are not allowed to participate, but once the work is presented in this form, and submitted by an eligible artist, then the work technically cannot be denied. After all, it is the work that is the important factor, and therefore, an attempt to censor the artist/country/region will hopefully be compromised by the inclusion of work from that region. This video will blur the boundaries set by the exhibition itself.

As an independent artist working in the Caribbean it was difficult for me to even make contact with artists from such diverse regions- from Iran to Zimbabwe to Syria to North Korea etc. Currently I have confirmed artists from each region except Korea and Sudan.

The video is experimental but it will have a documentary style. It will incorporate pictures, video clips, text (quotes) and audio pieces from artists. Artists who do not know each other but who have a common ground- of speaking out on politics, censorship, access, identity etc, especially in the forum of artists and art being censored by a governing body or institution in any way.

It is meant to be an open dialogue.

- I found out about the 'PLAY' exhibition from a forward sent to me in early June. Immediately I started conceptualizing and searching through networks and on google for artists to participate. Confirmed artists will be posted by the end of the month.

STILL

2010-03-27T07:01:00.000-07:00

These digital photographs were taken of my daughter as she played at the beach, and captured, experimenting with light exposure. They were altered to eradicate or strengthen background and foreground.

An extremely personal piece, these pictures mark a recurring dream of my daughter disappearing by water, as my father who loved the sea, died when I was close to the age she is in these pictures. My anxiety about family and loss mirror the subtle disturbance felt viewing the photographs, whose subject cannot ever be clearly seen. When in the foreground her face is in shadow, distorted by light or washed out, or she turns away from the viewer, moving into the distance.

The pictures may capture a still moment but the subject is never still in the sense that she cannot be seen clearly enough to behold her image to confirm her identity.

She is always just within your grasp but not completely.

BURY YOUR MOTHER (2009)

2009-09-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

This 45 minute video was created in part with funding from the Trinidad and Tobago Film Company. It was very loosely based on the short story I had written for Trinidad Noir. It is a haunting, non-linear visual narrative that observes a psychological engagement between a mother and her daughter.

Through experimental techniques, limited use of text and powerful still and moving imagery, you can glimpse the everyday actions and inactions of these two women, who are physically bound and confined to their house. They never occupy the same frame and conversations between them are few and spoken only in text.

These women struggle with departure, loss, intimacy, and betrayal. Comparable to a modern day “Miss Havisham,” the mother drifts around the house alone, and the daughter from time to time, scurries in and out and in-between spaces. Scorned by the rejection of an absent male, the mother often quarrels to herself.

The daughter, contentious from abuse, grapples with abandoning her mother to face the external world alone, or to continuously exist in the existential space to which she currently belongs.

Shooting the Video: Thanks to my very small cast!

Sabrina Charran

Alicia Guevara

Jaime Lee Loy

Setting up for the Dinner Sequence

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING

2008-03-01T06:00:00.000-08:00

'While you were sleeping' was a conceptual performance and a writer’s reading ( International Workshop, Hoy, Scotland). In days leading up to the performance I left messages on ripped up pieces of paper that I planted in between dishes, in shoes, in clothes, in people's rooms, under their pillows.....

Every artist got random messages either in tucked away in some personal item or space, or they stumbled upon them in the common dining, working and recreational areas.

These messages were either single sentences or constructed from just a few. They comprised excerpts from a semi-fictional story I was writing. These citations read like diary excerpts, and they made the reader feel like they had stumbled upon something private, something way too personal.

I was interrogating the line between personal and private spaces as my work often veers to the latter. Eventually there were notes left everywhere, as people throughout their day, would stumble upon them like found secrets. They were very short sentences but in them were whole stories or strong visuals with emotive underpinnings.

The morning of the performance the tables were set with teacups, plates, cutlery and bowls. Under each set was a personal note handwritten and addressed to each artist individually. It asked them to meet me at the corner at specific times.

When they walked down the hill they met me lying in bed in an open field under a small tent. They one by one climbed in bed with me where I read to them, whispering in their ears this pseudo bedtime story.

The story was stark and intimate. It spoke about the intricacies of relationships. Intimatings of abuse, of sexual experience, of longing, desire, rejection, and struggle. I filled a small sketchbook diary with writing and I decided impromptu which parts to read to each person.

All this time they stared outside of the tent facing the mountains of HOY, the open sky and the safe space of a picturesque landscape. I invited them to share with me and they did. It was the most rewarding and successful performance I have ever tried.

I was interrogating the line between writing and art making as part of the same process. I was investigating communication, the lack of, the inability to, and the 'uncomfortable- ness' of it in intimate circumstances. I was struggling in my work (and personally) with the lines between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

The performance itself, the act of reading in this bed while out in the open and staring at what seemed to be an non-threatening landscape reinforced my conviction that artists need a safe space to produce work. And as the work i produce is so intense usually, and so close to the realm of the personal, the workshop experience allows me to disrobe, to be less inhibited, and to face the difficult things that sometimes threaten my ability to produce work at all.

The Following

2008-02-01T08:19:00.000-08:00

Betty Corrigal's Grave

While at an International workshop in Hoy, Scotland, I was interested in a story I had heard about 'Betty Corrigal, from the 1770's. She had been a young girl, unmarried and pregnant for a visiting sailor, who left her to go whaling. Betty on her second attempt managed to commit suicide and because of this she could not be buried on consecrated ground. The Lords of the big estates also refused to provide her with a grave, and Betty was buried between two territories, as neither would have her.

She was buried in an unmarked grave and forgotten, and accidentally discovered in the 1930's and then again in 1940 when her grave now marked and protected, was moved to its current location. After being invisible for about 160 years, Betty now rests in one of the most visited graves in Orkney, and her story and name are as commonly spoken about as any other tale or folklore on the island, amongst those living there, and to those visiting.

I began forming ideas around folklore, about myths and tales, and inherited knowledge. I decided to eventually create my own folklore tales, invent my own characters, that through their abilities, magic, and story, would highlight forgotten tales that occur daily within the interior of people's homes. With a particular focus on reproductive rights, on domestic violence, and other such domestic experiences.

These series of photographs are also part of this idea. I took many pictuyres while at Hoy, and while there had begin to experiemnt with basic photoshop techniques. I managed to place Betty in each of my selected photos.

While visiting Hoy, there was an internal war waging inside my head. Amidst the beautiful scenery, there were vivid and horrible scenes from my past that refused, like Betty, to be buried. My experiences may not have been the same but they were intense and from the same realm of female suffering. I decided to metaphorically give Betty the movement and capacity to inhabit anywhere on the island, allowing what was once seen as outcast, free reign. She becomes common in the landscape, from seeing her over and over - in the same way that aspects of her story are universally common. Betty has been made a tourist attraction in real life, but her story of loss and persecution is not very uncommon through the themes her story conveys.

And in the same light, I carried Betty with me, the burden of her story through the burden of my past while at Hoy. She occupies all my 'tourist' pictures, giving some sombre weight to the picturesque surroundings.

LA FANTASIE

2008-01-01T05:13:00.000-08:00

La Fantasie was a collaborative project by The Collaborative Frog, a group of three Trinidadian artists. La Fantasie was an ephemeral installation funded by the Prince Claus Fund, Netherlands. Launched in 2008, just before the Carnival season in Trinidad, this temporary house structure was built in an empty lot in Belmont on Norfolk street, standing tall and pristine opposite to the PNM constituency office, (PNM being the ruling Government).

This project was named after the Prime Minister's newly constructed residence, and mirrored, and still mirrors well, the paradox of a nation that is touted as a 'fantasy island', a dream place to visit and live in. On closer inspection the core pillars for any progressive nation are crumbling - or rather, they are not quite built- with the standard of living deplorable for many, not enough schools, homicides and domestic violence cases on the rise, increased violence against children, more reports of incest and rape, women and children that go missing, a lacking health care system, - all of this amidst growing visible wealth, abundant in high rise buildings and events and places that become more all inclusive or more than ever exclusive.

La Fantasie takes you into this world. Not to ponder polemically on any singular theme. But to somehow feel the unrest inside the space.

To understand even if in an abstract way, something about domesticity, about settlement, about the struggle to find a place and the struggle for territory. Some have said the installation was a bit dramatic, nightmarish, horror movie like. They are quite right. This surreal feeling, garrish and overwhelming, is sometimes what this world we created, and the world we created it for, can feel like.

La Fantasie was built to mimic a colonial style house, decorated with fretwork and painted a stark white. The inside was painted black and hosted a single room where a few items of furniture and installations were set up. Visitors were greeted with a small hand torch which doubled as a UV light. The internal walls were covered with images, some grimacing faces, some contorted bodies, some purposefully semi abstract but overwhelming still.

In a corner of the room was a shallow grave- the floorboards having been removed. A video was projected from the ceiling, directly onto the grassy and rocky floor beneath the house. It is at first a vague image, with a texture of dirt or sand, but slowly the dirt is seen as being removed by an invisible force, all the while uncovering an unidentified body.

Like a watchmen in the corner of the room is a painting that alludes to a Christian Messiah. He is overlooking the entire scene and he is chained to the wall.

The rest of the house aside from a couch, a television atop a small coffee table, a fridge, a stove, and an isolated bath, is just a hollow dark room. Visitors step into the dark fumbling about, trying not to step onto the 'dead babies', (plastic IV bags with basic legs and arms, filled with red liquid), and labelled either 'dead girl' or 'dead boy.'

Some of these babies are in the bath, a video projection flickering over shallow water and their floating bodies. The video is of isolated body parts, of hands, of feet, of the side of a face. All belonging to an unidentified child, slow forming bruises are being formed.

Pictures documenting the process:

200 Drawings

2007-12-01T05:14:00.000-08:00

200 Drawings was a collaborative project between artist, Nikolai Noel and myself. For five days, we religiously visited the Alice Yard Space gallery for hours at a time. Here we repetitiously drew each other, confined to the box of the gallery space and a strict heap of 9x9’ white cartridge paper. Our medium ranged from charcoal and pencil to paint and pastels.

On the night of the opening we concluded with a performance. We continued drawing live, the glass door to the gallery box sealed and our audience peering in on us at a comfortable distance. Our performance ended as we completed 200 drawings.

This exercise was about limitations, budgetary limitations as well as that of time and space in which to conceptualize and execute a viable project. These very limitations helped us to focus on the actual process. Restrictions were imposed on time, subject, paper size, workspace, and the quantity of drawings. The title 200 drawings imply limitation as well as ambition and opportunity.

This is an exercise in which the participants constantly exchange feminine and masculine positions and perspectives. The observed/ surveyed becomes the observer/surveyor. During this act of drawing the artist makes constant and varying judgments about their subject through observation. In this situation the artist is simultaneously aware that these judgments are being about them.

"The project is a kind of exercise in looking ... a level of engagement and observation without direct interaction. This is apart from the obvious exercise in concentration, imagination, and execution involved.... ” -

Nikolai

STUDIO INSTALLATION: Roaches and Flowers

2007-10-30T08:03:00.000-07:00

While on residency at the Vermont Studio Centre, I set up a studio installation for one afternoon only. Clearing the studio of all materials I moved furniture from the living quarters, items such as a large floor rug, some wooden chairs, a coffee table, lamp etc, replacing the fluorescent lightbulb with a dim yellow. The studio was converted into a living room - one that seemed almost complete - welcoming but with something missing.

In the background was a faint haunting echo from the British singer, Amy Winehouse, with her remake of 'Love is a Losing Game.' At first the room looks inviting. Visitors who expect to see a stark studio space feel the inclination to wander in freely and have a seat.

However, on closer inspection, the scene feel like a static moment in time, with dried and dead flowers in a vase, with what seems to be coffee in a teacup that has been out for too long, chairs without seats, a rug twisted one edge up the corner of the wall - as if someone had shoved it there absent- mindedly. There is a book but the cover and pages are missing, a picture frame on the wall with no picture, and a plate that is covered in sentences ripped and pasted from a book about violent conquests (see Conversation Piece).

It is only when visitors walk into the room and turn again to face the opposite end where they entered, do they notice the flat screen atop a white pillar. Like an isolated art exhibit in a gallery, the flat screen is looping a series of thirty selected photographs - all created while on the residency and from my series 'Roaches and Flowers.'

They are of domestic items such as cutlery and knives that have been transformed using shoemaker nails and flowers in combinations that make them appear as insects in what appears to be wide open landscapes. Like the room, the images are attractive yet hauntingly disturbing.

CONVERSATION PIECE - From Roaches and Flowers

2007-10-25T05:14:00.000-07:00

Also part of “Roaches and Flowers: War in the Home.”, Conversation Piece is a sculptural installation, constructed from a ceramic plate, mixed media, and a second-hand book found in a garage sale in Vermont. ‘Savage Conquest’ was one of those stereotypical novels housewives supposedly read, filling their heads with fantasy and daydream. The plot involved a wealthy European female who visited an untouched island to pursue a torrid love affair with an indigenous male. Her furious fiancé follows her to wage war on the islanders.

(The cover of the novel)

This type of novel, in its deceptive fantasies which promote myths about social relationships and desire, is interrogated alongside the domestic space- another facilitator of myth and idealism. Stripping the book sentence by sentence, I pasted excerpts that referred to a physical war to create a psychological one.

Key sentences were used to totally cover the plate, which was then installed in my studio on a table, set with cutlery, wine glasses, and a serving tray of clams.

These clams were placed upright and open, alluding to moths and Venus fly traps. Embedded in them were rusty nails, slim phallic symbols inserted in the Yonic clam. These hard-shelled creatures, which are fleshy in the interior, now lie forced open with threatening protrusions.

The installation alluded to a dinner party for two, but only one plate is present.

ROACHES AND FLOWERS: War in the home

2007-10-20T05:12:00.000-07:00

This series of photographs charter a particular psychological crisis. It is a visual narrative of conquest, where gender politics 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 unseemly insect-like forms. Stereotypically considered a ‘woman’s space,’ the domestic center turns on its master. These insects, sometimes camouflaged or constructed with flowers, represent invasion, the unwelcome, the uncomfortable.

I am navigating a visual landscape within the illustrated physicality of a house structure. The house comes alive to speak secrets of abuse, battle for space and territory, negotiations of survival, and the politics of the personal. The female subject finds agency and defense-tactics through the personification of domestic items as insects.

Spoons and forks, plates and flowers – they become insects, they become weapons. These images, these created spaces, generate an unfamiliar feel in a space associated with familiarity and comfort (the home). They are simultaneously ugly as they are beautiful.

As the domestic space continues to become more alienating and complex, there is an intense emotive response to these incessant transitions from the familiar to the unfamiliar, in the physical and psychological realm. This emotive response exists in the ephemeral and in the metaphysical. The construction of creatures that simultaneously mimic the appearances of flowers and insects, offer new codes, new language, new translation to the realities within which they exist.

These creatures are found in domestic spaces at a point of transition, at a point of collapse and decay. They scurry through the rubble strategically, transforming from prey to predator, blurring the distinction. The landscape changes to an ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ Kafkaesque world, where these creatures interact with each other, with themselves, and with no one.

THE ROACH - from Roaches and Flowers

2007-10-05T05:14:00.000-07:00

The installation and performance ‘The Roach,’ was the first piece produced as part of The Unfamiliar, and which sparked the photographic series Roaches and Flowers: War in the Home.

Using real flowers that were delivered to my studio at The Vermont Studio Centre, I created a large insect from the petals that I pinned painstakingly to the wall.

The insect was then photographed in different stages of decay - every day until it completely died.

Landscapes of pins and petals were also made from this installation.

Attached to the flowers was a paper note from the flower shop stating: How to care for your arrangement, which really struck me. The flowers themselves were an intrusion, a bribe that many times before had been rejected and which had followed me outside the confines of Trinidad.

These beautiful arrangements evoked an intense sense of terror bridging on paranoia, as memory and history refused to let me enjoy their presented offerings of peace. It was like receiving a bouquet of roaches. It was then I began to realize that unfamiliarity in a familiar space or through familiar means is like surviving a war. Nostalgia and new-found freedom cannot resolve the discomfort that remains.

SKETCHES: ROACHES AND FLOWERS

2007-10-01T08:15:00.000-07:00

UNEASE (An Eight Step Programme)

2006-09-01T05:13:00.000-07:00

To the women from UNEASE- thank You
Lisa Marie, Ellen, Sabrina, and Annalisa

This project examines the idea of the uncomfortable, with direct reference to the female subject – her body, her societal roles, and the politics of her place within the home.

The satirical eight steps to normalcy - or eight steps to being a natural or ideal woman -emotively depicts the psychological experience of several nameless female subjects, who try to fit themselves into accepted roles that they do not desire. The foundations of gender perception and conformity are challenged through the grey, ambivalent and sometimes antagonistic representations of female tropes: The Wife, The Slut, The Mother to be, and The Girl.

The motif of a measuring tape recurs throughout the video, deconstructing the act of defining. This video presents a platform from which to re-think former myths and accepted "truths" about what being a woman represents.

Although feminist activism has maneuvered these concerns to the forefront, female angst is still stigmatized as "bitterness", rather than seen as a real expression of circumstance, and a call to alleviate inequity.

Unease gives glimpses into the problematic side of the female gender structure, such as eating disorders, notions of chastity and motherhood, the demonization of women's sexuality as a mechanism for control, and some women's own acceptance or dependencies of these boundaries.

'Unease' is a video installation that screened as part of 'Visibly Absent' - a series of exhibitions hosted by 'GALVANIZE in Trinidad September to October 2006. Projected in a very dark room, in a small concrete box, it was the first art project to be screened at the Alice Yard Space.

PRO-TEST - 2003 Mural project

2003-09-01T17:19:00.000-07:00

PRO-TEST The Mural:
charcoal mural 30 ft (picture 1) - produced in 2003

Pro-Test was produced alongside a 40 minute documentary entitled PROTEST: young mothers speak out. This body of work was produced while participating on a three month Local Artist-in-Residence Programme at Caribbean Contemporary Arts (CCA), which was exhibited in July and August 2003.

Each separate panel is viewed together to form a surreal metaphorical society where biblical words are threaded through the imagery. This work was the beginning of a serious investigation that continues, beginning with personal experience.

The Cross: (section of mural), approx 6’ x 3’ (picture 2)

A woman bearing several crosses all labelled with words such as SHAME, standing above another in the foetal position, next to a headless woman with the letter A written on her body as if on a Post-it-note. This refers to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, “The Scarlet Letter’ but it is not A for adultery, it is A for Alone.

Carry Your Burden:
(section of mural), approx 3’ x 8’ (picture 3)

A woman crawls through a city like a Hong Kong figure. Perched on her back are buildings which are labelled with words such as ‘Prejudice’, “No Time’, “Alone’, and ‘ Balancing school, work, and home.’

Taking Over: approx 3’ x 6’ (picture 4)
A wasp with eyes for wings - society ‘maco-ing’, relating to gossip and stigma. Young women enslaved by this attitude towards them are whipped and bound (gagged) by the eyelashes of the wasps’ eyes.

The Garden:
(section of mural), approx 2.5’ x 3’ (picture 5)

Women’s bodies form the tree trunks and the ‘forbidden fruit’ in this garden, which plays on the idea that the ‘woman is to blame’ for her unplanned pregnancy. With reference to Adam blaming Eve in the Garden of Eden, it quotes October Project’s verse ‘And God said the reason had hung form the tree, but I feel the reason hanging on me.”

PROTEST

2003-08-01T05:16:00.000-07:00

MADAM

2002-05-01T12:59:00.000-07:00

Temporary Page: About Change Project

2002-05-01T08:56:00.000-07:00

The Race
Metamorphosis

Venus Trap

Roaches and Flowers: Landscape

Talk To Me

Leavings

Bury Your Mother Video Still

The Other (in progress)

2001-10-27T08:30:00.000-07:00

Wash Stains (in progress)

2001-10-26T12:43:00.000-07:00