In the short film Dendrostalkers, the view is from the driver’s seat of a car curving along a dirt road through a forest at night. The trees are thick and dark, then give way to a clearing, a pile of fresh lumber. The narration speaks of foreboding. The car stops, and something springs from the pile of dead trees, a new limb, animated, making shapes in the air. It’s the next step in evolution, maybe a dispatch from the future. It’s an art project that has something to say about our relationship to the forest now.Ancestral Arbor: Forest Bathing and the Black Journey to Liberation.Dendrostalkers, artist Julia Oldham writes, is about ​“trees that are evolving to transcend the three-dimensional world in order to escape human destruction. Combining footage of clear cuts in the Coburg Hills with hand drawn and digital animation,” the short film ​“takes us on a drive through a forest peppered with trees behaving strangely: they grow and regress, break down into geometric abstractions, and disappear into black holes.” The plot: Disregarding ​“an emergency warning from the National Forest Service, two sisters attempt to film higher dimensional trees called ​‘dendrotopes’ to post them on an online forum. They find themselves in competition with a stranger whose username is @dendrostalker1992 and taking risks to acquire the most daring footage.”As ominous and uncanny as it is, though, Dendrostalkers isn’t a horror movie. It’s about the world evolving beyond us. For some that might be terrifying. For others it might be beautiful. The distinct possibility of the latter connects Oldham’s piece to the rest of the show: ​“Forest Bathing,” a show curated by Alex Santana and featuring the work of 26 artists exploring our connection to nature, and how deepening that connection can affect our lives.“Forest bathing is a deep mode of relaxation that encourages humans to spend long periods of time in forest ecosystems, usually integrating acts of walking, sitting, and meditating,” an accompanying note states. ​“When practiced frequently and intentionally, this deeply embodied reflective state can also increase human life expectancy, as being outdoors is generally synonymous with enhanced well-being. In contrast with hiking, a physical exercise that activates our nervous system and can be done while thinking about other things, forest bathing is more about being, in acute awareness of one’s environment and our relationship to it.”Untitled.“Mirroring the expansiveness of the forest, much like underground mycelial networks and rhizomatic plant stems, as a practice, forest bathing offers us an entry point for interspecies communication, understanding, and reciprocity,” the note continues.The artists in the show approach the topic from a few different angles. ​“Some of the artists included explore the various ways in which culture can be kept alive, like a tended fire,” the accompanying note states. ​“Others remain committed to the potential horizons of movement and change over time.” Still others ​“engage the surreal and the uncanny,” while ​“some focus on the gravity of our shared memories and dreams, foregrounding the emphatic connections we have to our ancestors (both human and non-human).”Nadine Nelson’s installation in the vestibule of the Ely Center conveys a deep sense of how our lives might be altered, and perhaps improved, by a more profound and immediate connection to nature. It’s not just the plants in the doorway, lending greenery and oxygen to the air, or the leaves on the floor softening the hard lines of the architecture. It’s also the way she connects nature — through photographs interspersed with the flora — to her sense of family, friends, community, and ancestry. The simple yet fecund implication: all of these elements are part of the same thing. Vick Quezada’s piece conveys a similar message about the resilience of nature in the face of our intrusions on it, as a healthy cactus grows from a few handfuls of dirt spilled from a manmade object. It doesn’t take much, the piece suggests, for nature to grow strong. Sometimes all we have to do is accept it.The Pink Face Beyond the Magnifying Glass.Sebastián Cole Galván is among the artists who examine the possibilities of change. Through Galván’s artistic style, the identity of the creature, which can seem straightforward on first glance, gets muddy fast, to the point where it can be understood as transforming itself before our eyes. Is it a cat? A fish? Is it all turning into a plant? In the piece, the ambiguity and sense of flow makes labelling it impossible — even as it retains the sense of a cohesive whole.Carne de mi carne (Wild Coffee v. Coral Ardisia).Jacoub Reyes’s pieces of wrestling figures likewise delivers several ideas at once. In depicting plantlike structures in humanoid form, he highlights that — in a very real sense — we share ancestry with plants (and, indeed, animals, and all living things). But humans have done much to pit plants against one another. Wild coffee is native to Florida. By contrast, coral ardisia is an introduced and now invasive species. It was brought to the United States from Asia for safe in a commercial nursery in 1825, and appeared in gardens in Florida by 1896. As the Florida Museum relates, ​“it became a popular ornamental because it looks gorgeous and grows well with little assistance. By the 1960s it started turning up in natural areas of Florida, and by the 1980s it had completely escaped into the wild — and started to cause trouble.”The first impulse among most people is to not worry about (or even notice) invasive species. The second impulse, when you become aware of them, is to try to remove the invasive species to allow native plants to grow. But Reyes’s piece suggests that the situation is more complex than that. The figures are wrestling, but also intertwining. Both of them grow in an active system that also envelops us, whether we know it or not. We’re a part of it, too. When we understand that better — and, on an emotional level, feel it more deeply — how will we adapt?“Forest Bathing” runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through Oct. 27. Visit ECOCA’s website for hours and more information.