Taking inspiration from The Book of Miracles, an illustrated manuscript depicting miraculous phenomena and awesome apocalyptic visions of the 16th century, Hybrid Ecologies looks to the past — ancient and medieval mythology — to speculate on the future of our changing times. As visitors travel through Hybrid Ecologies, the boundaries known to separate ecosystems collapse and begin to break. Creatures of the sea swim with those who fly in the sky, while sharing terrain with those known to inhabit the land.

Desert, forest, and mountains, converge. Fusing and confusing space and form and new relationships between species are built. As these barriers are shattered, visitors are invited step inside the suspended forms that act as helmets, to contemplate possibilities for cohabitation, mutation, and hybridization. With extinction and devastation comes the need for imagination, possibility for revelation, the discovery of new creation. An evolving community full of transformation and metamorphoses, Hybrid Ecologies offers visitors the opportunity to play within a living diorama to experience shifts in scale and time, to imagine a world where borders are fluid between all living species, are shattered, and a new sky’s the limit takes hold.

Laura Bernstein is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She uses video, performance, sculpture, installation, and painting to reflect on human and animal behavior, alternative histories, mythology and the grotesque. Her work has been included in exhibitions at BRIC, NURTUREart, and the Long Island University Humanities Gallery, in Brooklyn New York; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Vox Populi and Icebox Space, in Philadelphia, PA; ACRE Projects, Chicago, IL; and Franz Josefs Kai 3, Vienna, Austria. She is a 2018-19 Grant Recipient of The Franklin Furnace Fund and has directed and produced A Speculative Performance presented by The Institute of Super-Species Research and Experimentation in conjunction with the BRIC Biennial: Volume III, South Brooklyn Edition. Bernstein holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a teaching artist at CMA since 2014.

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