By Cinara Marquis
Logan Brody is a New York-based multimedia artist, originally from Brooklyn, New York. Through an interdisciplinary approach, she explores the intimacies of the human body with sculpture, painting and metalsmithing.
Brody is inspired by the relationship between the body and its environment and aims to recognize its presence, surface, condition and dissolution. She was born in 1991 and is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
This question-and-answer was conducted over email Sept. 18.
Question: When did you start making art? What keeps you passionate about art?
Answer: I’ve made art since I was a child, growing up in a household with two parents who taught and made art themselves. They encouraged me to seriously pursue my talents and passions and that’s what I’ve done ever since.
Over the years I’ve tried different types of artmaking and media, from creating my own visual art to supporting other artists through grant writing and advocacy. I find that being an artist is intrinsic to what I do and who I am, no matter how I express it.
Q: What is your favorite medium and why?
A: Picking a favorite medium is difficult. While I feel energized and challenged making sculpture, my first love will always be painting. It’s a language I never forget and a way of making I come back to again and again. I’m constantly learning and exploring new ways to engage with the medium.
Q: What is your favorite subject?
A: Primarily, I’m a figurative artist. My work almost always deals with the human figure and the spaces it occupies. That doesn’t mean my work is hyperrealistic. Instead, I’m most interested in how far we can stretch our ability to recognize a body’s presence, its condition, or assimilation into its environment. The fracturing and disintegration of the figure is really what inspires me to investigate and make.
Q: What influences your work?
A: My work is influenced by a variety of different things. I’m fascinated by the interplay of light and shadow; broken relics preserved without all their parts and pieces; figurative painting and representation from across global history; and a slew of artists working in all sorts of media and time periods. I also feel it’s important to make physical objects, really building things with my hands.
I enjoy the process of making but I don’t let that take precedence over creating an object that I feel stands up to my vision of what it should be. That drive really influences the way I work and what I ultimately create.
Q: Where are you from? If not the Plattsburgh area, how did you find yourself here?
A: I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and at 18 years old moved to Chicago to attend college (at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago). I lived there for several years until relocating to Plattsburgh in 2016 with my partner, who accepted a position at SUNY Plattsburgh.
Q: Could you tell me about your process with your Petite Galerie exhibition? How were you approached, and whose idea was it?
A: The Petite Galerie is a fantastic new initiative from the Strand Center for the Arts to bring art outside the traditional gallery setting and into everyday life. Mollie Ward, the Strand’s clay studio manager, conceived of the idea to celebrate joy and playfulness in art. I loved the idea and, after Mollie approached me to see if I’d like to be the inaugural exhibiting artist, I enthusiastically said yes.
Much of my 3D work is on an intimate scale — small or handheld. I use the process of life casting to take molds of real body parts that I then mash-up and remix into wax, resin, and metal sculptures.
The idea of a gallery where my art could be viewed as monumental was particularly exciting. When I create many of my sculptures, I like to imagine them operating in the same way one day, somewhere on display outdoors or in a gallery and large enough for people to walk around. Pushing the limits of how we understand and perceive what a body is, especially out of the familiar context of human-scale.
You can visit Brody’s portfolio and learn more at her website, https://loganbrody.com/
