Bright Ecologies
Three Studies in the Urban Wilds
Study II: Boston
The collective BRIGHT ECOLOGIES (artists Patte Loper, Mary Ellen Strom and Sheila Novak) developed experimental artworks in Bozeman, MT, Queens, NY and Boston, MA (respectively) in August, 2020. The artists identified three sites in the ‘urban wilds’ of these three cities, and developed in-depth relationships with those sites.
Together, BRIGHT ECOLOGIES develops more-than-human participatory research methods and ethics to develop new place-based artworks. The artists’ experimental methods and ethos will attempt to enter into shared, playful spaces of interspecies collaboration and care. Working at the intersection of culture and the environment Three Studies in the Urban Wilds exposes ways that the environmental crisis was created and has been maintained by white settler culture, industry and capitalism. Our climate emergency is accelerating at a much higher speed than white settlers’ awareness, empathy, or policies.
Using feminist, radical pedagogical and decolonial ideas and practices, BRIGHT ECOLOGIES works to develop empathic relationships with non-human change agents for the purpose of environmental justice.