Michele Brody
Hector’s Window

Media: handmade paper
Size: 11" x 8.5" x 0"
$650

Artist Statement:
The essence of my practice thrives on the interaction with new communities by exploring what it means to establish roots within an unfamiliar environment. With each new location I conduct a careful investigative method that involves the gathering of regional materials, native plants, local stories from community members, photos of architectural landmarks and historic research. I employ this process to create site-generated works of art that illuminate the unobserved in our day to day surroundings and the challenges facing our environment. I am intrigued with the process of creating a controlled environment where the work organically develops and changes over time. Building from this foundation, my work represents the daily flux and naturally occurring entropy surrounding us, while exploring how memory and time simultaneously erode and enhance the interpretations of our experiences.

I have developed an interdisciplinary practice that incorporates a wide spectrum of resources and techniques that represent the daily flux and naturally occurring entropy surrounding us, while exploring how memory and time simultaneously erode and enhance the interpretations of our experiences.

I utilize sustainable modes of production by regenerating the natural cellulose detritus from a place left behind by the seasonal changes. I have been composing mixed-media, handmade paper drawings, collages and sculptures that represent a form of place-making by embedding natural elements, maps and architectural imagery into the very structure of the paper as water marks. This process is combined with a technique I pioneered of germinating seeds within the paper, where the sprouts and roots generate a form of improvisational mark making that comment on the tenuous relationship between nature and humans within the built environment.

The result is a portfolio comprised of mixed-media, handmade paper drawings, collages, sculptures and installations that represent a form of place-making by embedding natural elements from that place into the actual structure of the paper cast in a range of natural forms or paper sheets.

Biography

Born in Brooklyn in 1967, Michele Brody received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1989 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994 from the Fiber and Material Studies Department. She has had one person shows at the Atelier-galeried’Art Contemporain: Arras, France; Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporaneo: San Jose, Costa Rica; Dina4 Projekte: Munich, Germany; Temple Judea Museum: Elkins Park, PA; and in New York City with Chashama, Littlejohn Contemporary, the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, Hudson Guild, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the Bronx Museum.

Michele Brody has been the recipient of a grant or residency almost every year since 1995 from such institutions as the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Pollock/Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Bronx Council on the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts. Brody has worked as an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Ox-Bow, Emmanuel College, Wave Hill and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation. In 2006 she completed two permanent works of public art in The Bronx for the MTA and the Department of Education’s Public Art for Public Schools program. In 2011 she was awarded the Best 3-D Entry at the international Art Prize competition in Grand Rapids, MI by juror Glenn Harper of Sculpture Magazine for her installation “Nature Preserve” at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art. Michele Brody currently resides and works in The Bronx.

http://michelebrody.com/