by Sharon Michelle Terrell
Art and Ecology… so under my understanding of art and ecology, I think the two should make an incredible alliance toward change in our social consciousness. Art is meant to evoke emotion in the viewer and ecology needs emotion to harness change. The need could not be more dire at this time, at this very moment, this great turning point in time where if we look the other way things will travel at the speed of light toward irreversible negative changes to our way of life and for some our survival!
I’ve been reading and seeing images online, like the rest of us, about natural disasters, and watching the politicians struggle to make the budgets keep up with the changes. Those in government are saying that not everyone can be spared, that there will be sacrifices. We all know this, and none more than the children. Kids now burdened with the task of convincing adults that our survival depends on our ability to care enough to make the necessary changes to reverse the current flow of plastic, of waste, and of a way of living, to change from an excessive consumption motto to a sustainable motto.
A sustainable motto, so logical, so right, it is simple, it is for our own survival, how could we not care about that! How could we not get that right? No instead we feel like arguing with each other about who is right, we feel like buying things to feel better when we are targeted by marketing. We feel. We are feeling creatures, who harness anger, resentment, joy, boredom, jealousy, excitement, contempt and so being these feeling creatures, why can we not see the path that we are on and feel like making the necessary changes? We need ART, we need Artists to make this movement what it should be! If try to reason our points with each other nobody wants to be wrong, but with art, you cannot unfeel what you have been opened up to feel and see.
With art horizons are broadened life is not only black and white or in full color or in monochrome, according to what you focus on and how you yourself feel, now its like you have read a book, its like you have touched the alien on his fingertip and accessed the information he has transferred to you with telepathy. In other words, you have felt an emotion that someone has communicated with no words, no space to reason it out or to want to be right, it just is.
Our ecology needs this sort of communication more than ever right now to communicate its dire S.O.S.... will we, the artists answer that call is mass, will we the artist change the world? It has been done before using propaganda with negative results, can we not also do the same for happier results and our very survival?
