The STRATUS Life in Green Launch Event was hosted at Edmonton City Centre Mall from September 9th to 24th, 2022 to celebrate the launch of STRATUS MINI ISSUE 02: Life in Green.

The exhibition brought together a photo gallery, interactive installations, 3D animations, projections, and more. These works showcased the artists’ interactions and sensorial experiences with the natural world—one restlessly full of projects—rolling meadows, rivers, bird nests, and a variety of mushrooms. Each has its own trajectory, succession, beginning, end, and cycle.

Beyond the direct and sensorial, the works celebrated and confronted the systemic essence of nature—generation, maintenance, adaptation, dynamism—these slow-moving processes have changed Earth on a time scale of millions of years and are juxtaposed by the episodic and contingent changes that have disrupted nature during the Anthropocene.

A critique raised by the artists is how human and artistic practices should fit into nature, particularly by engaging with the framework of sustainability—a word sometimes used as a green cloak draped over business as usual. How can human activity promote natural flourishing when nature already flourishes on its own? The artists presented unique answers with reimagined forms of human activity which nourish the entire community of natural life on Earth.