STILL STANDING: ANCIENT FOREST FUTURES
Legacy Gallery, 2022
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CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Standing in an ancient temperate rainforest and exchanging breath with thousand year old trees can profoundly alter our perception of nature and time. Feeling gratitude for the forest's life-support systems can help mend the disconnections engendered by colonialism and consumer culture. Still Standing: Ancient Forest Futures brings together Indigenous and non-indigenous artists to create space for dialogue about old growth from a range of perspectives. The exhibition explores the intersections of art, ecology, and activism, creating fertile ground for new forms of cross-disciplinary praxis. In this time of climate crisis, art is essential. Artists offer new perspectives and embodied experiences that can move us past paralysis and into action. Like ecologists, many artists observe and reveal relationships which lead to new connections. Art can also expand our capacity to feel ecological grief and thereby transform it. Hope and resistance, like art-making, are tenacious creative processes of actualizing visions and taking risks in order to forge new futures - futures which include standing ancient forests. |