11.07.08

Bioartist creates art from grass

By Mari Grigaliunas

When you hear a reference to a grass skirt you usually picture a hula girl in a skirt made of long dried grass blades, but bioartist Michele Brody took a whole new approach to the article of clothing. She created a skirt of lace with tiers of pockets, and from these pockets she grew grass native to northern California.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Brody received her undergraduate degree, in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College. Her original study of architecture is evident in many of the installations she creates today.

Eventually she found her way to the Art Institute of Chicago where she received her Master's of Fine Arts. While there, she worked with a local group of artists known as Ha Ha. The group first introduced Brody to hydroponics, a method of growing plants without soil in a mineral nutrient solution, which is a common aspect in much of Brody's work. The group, Brody recalls, also influenced her largely by teaching her to not only look beyond the physical relationship of art to its environment, but its social relationship as well.

"Laurie Palmer, one of the members of Ha Ha, it was through her that I learned about the term the 'Limen' for the first time," Brody said. "And it's used in anthropology to describe this intermediary phase that mostly young men go through when they're going through an initiation ritual."

She went on to explain her own personal interpretation of the "Limen" and how it can affect transformation process.

"The Limen is … how I see it is the space in between; physical or mental space in between, where you never know what could happen," Brody said. "You know, you're going somewhere, but on your way there when you're focused on your goal, something else could maybe occur, and that could alter where you're going."
In one of her pieces, "Tea House Productions," Brody set herself up in a tea cart as part of a Brooklyn art festival. She offered free cups of tea in exchange for conversation. She then dried all of the tea bags and transcribed the conversation on them.

"Tea is a beverage that is served all throughout the world and has a very religious, ceremonial, sociological inherent practice engaged in drinking it, which is not really part of coffee," Brody said. "Here in the United States we don't have a tea drinking culture like the rest of the world."

Brody visited Loyola University to give a lecture on her art and share pizza with the students of Loyola's freshman seminar taught by Hunter O'Reilly, Ph.D., on bioart.
"We constantly debate all the pieces that we see, and whether we would actually consider it art or not, outside of the class," freshman Wendy Gomez said. "But I think it's pretty cool how she takes something so simple as grass and makes something bigger out of it."

Students suggested plants for Brody to incorporate in her most recent exhibition at the Flatfile Galleries in Chicago. The installation, Garden Sentinels, is a recreation of one of her earlier installments in New York.

"The piece is relating to nature surviving within this industrialized world that we have now," Brody said. "If you just look at what's happening in China, it's just sickening how they've taken 150 years of our development into 15 years, and it's scary as hell. So the work is very ominous. I've painted the walls black. There's bright, yet dull, light that's created by energy efficient LED lights, which is the light of the future. And it's giving a sense of what the future could be like. It's not a happy piece. The happiness comes from hopefully the plants surviving."

The collaboration between students and artist was one of Brody's attempts to connect with the community and engage the public with her art. Brody succeeded, at least for some, in presenting her message.

"She put us into her mindset, and she would tell us all the meaning behind it and what it meant to her," Gomez said. "Hearing [it] kind of made me appreciate it a little bit more, and made me think of it as art a little bit more."

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