Photographs by Ofer Wolberger

The young girl locked in the moss-lined cage in Meghan Boody’s living room is not, as one parent put it, “a playdate gone awry.” She (or rather, it) is a very lifelike silicone sculpture. The white mice nibbling at the girl’s prone body, however, are actual living rodents. It’s a jarring juxtaposition, all right, and not the sort of tableau one is accustomed to finding inside a loft on West Broadway in Tribeca. But for Boody, an artist whose work will be shown at the Affirmation Arts and Salomon Contemporary galleries this week, the otherworldly and the domestic are often cohabitants. “I see it as a fairy bower,” she says of her autobiographically inspired living-room installation, The Mice and Me. “Other people see it as more dark.” Raised on the Upper East Side and trained as a photographer in Paris, Boody began renting this apartment—formerly an artist’s party-ready live-work space, complete with a Japanese soak tub—in 1994. She now owns it, and with the help of her similarly artistic 9-year-old son Toby, architect David Hotson, and artist-contractor Randy Polumbo, she has transformed it into a seven-room fantasy lair that is equal parts Alice in Wonderland and Being John Malkovich. “I wanted a rambling house with secret closets,” she says, sweeping past the wildly eclectic furniture, sloping fifteen-foot ceilings, exposed fir beams, and—at least—two hidden rooms.

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• Table of Contents: Mar 7, 2011 issue of New York | Subscribe!