LaCalle Chesapeake Gallery

The Dr. James & Lynne LaCalle Chesapeake Gallery serves as a vital educational link between the community and the practice of art and design in the region.

Located in Bel Air, Maryland, the Gallery features contemporary art by established and emerging artists, as well as Harford Community College faculty, staff, and students. 

CURRENTLY ON EXHIBIT:

instability

instability, a collaboration between Aaron Ellison and Eric Zeigler, is a collection of large-format photographs that stem from a decade long artistic relationship linking art and science.

Using contemporary versions of 19th-century dry collodion glass plates, 20th-century film, and new digital technologies, Ellison and Zeigler challenge the assumption that photographs and digital images portray an objective reality. They seek to 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.

This exhibition explores modern ecosystems which have been 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 is an artist, designer, and researcher whose current work involves photography and the unconventional transformation of images. He earned an MFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and exhibits his work nationally and internationally. Zeigler is an Assistant Professor of Art in the Department of Art at the University of Toledo.

Aaron Ellison retired in July 2021 after 20 years as the Senior Research Fellow in Ecology at Harvard University. Following a sabbatical year at Harvard in 2001-2002, Aaron spent 20 years at the Harvard Forest – Harvard’s 1500-hectare outdoor classroom and laboratory for ecological research and has continued his ecological research after retiring. Aaron also maintains an art studio dedicated to woodworking, photography, and poetry within the Artisan’s Asylum in Allston/Brighton (Massachusetts).