Prairie grasses and flowers are starting to grow in some of the hanging transparent plastic tubes that make up Michele Brody’s installation Prairie Experiment. Seeds float on the surface of water in which nutrients have been dissolved. While some of the seeds have sprouted, others have merely grown moldy.
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Prairie Experiment doesn’t pretend to be Eden. “It’s not a healthy system,” says Brody. “Many of the freshly germinated plants are dying because the water has no oxygen supply.” What’s important to Brody is articulating “the process of life and death, growth and decay. . . . If the plants do die,” she says, “it’s because of the environment that they’re in, which is a reflection of the environment we’ve created. It’s also a matter of testing which grasses would survive the best in the environments around us–like a toxic environment especially. If I really wanted to grow healthy grasses I would not have put them in tubes.”
Prairie Experiment is at ARC Gallery, 1040 W. Huron, through September 30. Call 733-2787 for more. One of Brody’s Elusive Walkways–concrete blocks she casts herself that are laid with space between them for grass to grow–is on permanent display outside the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes, Evanston. Call 708-491-0266.
