The collective BRIGHT ECOLOGIES (artists Patte Loper, Sheila Novak,
and Mary Ellen Strom) is developing experimental artworks in
Boston, MA, Bozeman, MT, and Queens, NY. The artists have
identified three sites in the ‘urban wilds’ of these three cities,
and are in process of developing in-depth relationships with those
sites. Together, BRIGHT ECOLOGIES is developing more-than-human
participatory research methods and ethics to create 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 Bright Ecologies is working to
expose ways that the environmental crisis was designed 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
will work to develop empathic relationships with non-human change
agents for the purpose of social and environmental justice.