“Instability” by Eric Zeigler and Aaron Ellison | Awards Collective GalleryTalk
The Awards Collective was created to feature the works of artist who have received either a Juror’s Award or Director’s Award in ASG’s Online exhibitions. Eric Zeigler and Aaron Ellison’s image Polypores, Allerton Park and Retreat Center, Monticello, Illinois – Infrared Light, 2024 received the Juror’s Award in the art + science exhibition juried by Linda Alterwitz. Eric and Aaron’s exhibition Instability is discussed in this GalleryTalk.
Artist Statement
The “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, VIII
Watch for long enough, and anything that appears to be stable will reveal its true perpetual state of instability. Imaging devices record single moments: Crack! Trees fall, shutters snap, photographs are fixed. We expect these moments to be decisive, but when we combine the static objectif-icity of still images on film, paper, and glowing screens with our expectations of how the world “works,” we disregard its true dynamic nature.
Using contemporary versions of 19th-century dry collodion glass plates, 20th-century film, and new digital technologies, we challenge the assumption that photographs and digital images portray an objective reality. We reclaim the aesthetics behind the myths of the Westward Expansion, the American Frontier, and similar colonialist activities that have occurred throughout the world, and illuminate contradictions in 21st-century narratives of environmental stability and preservation. Modern ecosystems deemed healthy and stable only because we’ve left them alone are shown to be far from stable, unchanging, and, as the US National Park Service would have it, “unimpaired.” Are these tiny islands of nature within a vast ocean of unchecked development ecological reserves or fading theme parks? The essence of their ongoing and essential decay, normally hidden behind an opaque, yet gossamer fog, is unveiled in instability.
Eric Zeigler and Aaron Ellison
April, 2025
Bio
Eric Zeigler is Associate Professor of Art at the University of Toledo. His research and artistic practice interrogate the underpinnings of the history of the photographic process by purposefully exploiting problematic contemporary Western cultural categorizations and presumptions that are placed on photographic and lens-based imagery. Aaron Ellison is a Boston-based photographer, sculptor, writer, and Senior Research Fellow Emeritus in Ecology at Harvard University. His research and artistic practice focus on the disintegration and reassembly of ecosystems following natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Working together, Eric + Aaron explore unknown worlds beyond our current understanding. Their joint work currently centers on non-anthropocentric/posthumanist aesthetics and creative photodocumentation of forests and deep time.
website: ericzeigler.com
instagram: @ericzeiglerphoto