4/9 Lunch + Learn: Aaron Ellison
Join the Nature Lab for a Lunch + Learn with Aaron Ellison, photographer and former Deputy Director of Harvard Forest, for a talk on his photographic practice.
Interested? RSVP here! Note registrations are encouraged but not required to attend. Food and refreshments will be served. This event is open to members of the RISD community (students, faculty, staff) only at this time.
About the talk: Imaging devices record single moments: Crack! Trees fall, shutters snap, photographs are fixed. But as the objectif-icity of still images falls away, the unstable, “state of emergency” in which we live is revealed to be, as Walter Benjamin wrote, not the exception but the rule. With collodion glass plates, film, and digital technologies, we challenge the assumption that photographic images portray objective reality, reclaim the aesthetics behind colonialist myths, 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, pacé the US National Park Service, “unimpaired.” Are these tiny islands of nature within oceans 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.
About the presenter: Aaron Ellison is a Boston (USA)-based photographer, sculptor, creative writer, and Senior Research Fellow Emeritus in Ecology at Harvard University. His artistic practice, research, and creative writing focus on the disintegration and reassembly of ecosystems following natural and anthropogenic disturbances. His photography has been exhibited in solo, collaborative, and juried group exhibitions in the US, Europe, and Asia; his creative writing and photographs have been exhibited and published online and in print by the Boston Art Review, The Dark Mountain Project, the Paris Institute, Objet-a Creative Studio, Nature, and in two photobooks (Vanishing Point [2017] and instability [2024]; anthologized in Forest Under Story (University of Washington Press) and Weathering Change (Harvard); and appeared in exhibition catalogs from North Carolina State University (group exhibition: Art’s Work in Biotechnology: Shaping Our Genetic Futures); the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (2021 and 2024 New Media Art Conferences) and the A Smith Gallery (art + science III). Whenever he can, he works wood. Find him online at https://unbalancedecologist.net.
