The emptiness of outer space has a surprising desire for Brittany Nelson. “I can’t make you love me.” Her interest in sci-fi archives, travel agency videos and early photochemistry techniques at her 2024 performance at the Customer Gallery in Chicago, was a soundtrack by a reliable Bonnie Raitt Ballad that digs out the desires of desires (I can’t make you love you but don’t make you feel like you / You can’t make your stuff feel impossible and won’t make you feel yourself.
Nelson’s interaction with an alien-themed adult was inspired by an unusual muse: the legendary Mars rover, opportunity. “I call her a lesbian idol,” the artist said. During her 2004-18 service on the Red Planet, the female pronoun attached to NASA was adopted. When I visited her studio at Sunset Park in Brooklyn, Nelson told me: “She was one of the furthest robots we sent off the off-road vehicle and she took a lot of images.” “She was on an expedition alone, doing these Butch Rock experiments [casting] With a glance at the entire landscape, it’s an absolute lesbian: a longing glance, never close the distance. ”
To attract the image of opportunity, Nelson printed the bromination process of the printing composite, an early 20th century technology that provides a more ethereal, painterly look to the photograph. Source images from NASA are “so excellent, but shared only on Science Y, tech-crazy blogs,” she said, who tend to see them as datasets rather than aesthetic entities. “I want to put romanticism back in the image.”
She also discovered metaphorical resonance from a more personal perspective. Nelson recalled her growth in Montana’s “cultural vacuum,” saying, “I started thinking about the feeling of having to reverse engineering and being a gay man trapped in a very isolated environment. Then all of this similarity to space exploration, and Sci-Fi became obvious.”
Brittany Nelson: Everything except signature is me2023.
Photo by Evan Jenkins/Chicago Artist and Customer Gallery
In her studio, Nelson was secreted in a former military supply base, and Nelson worked with the giant Fotar photo amplifier of the 1950s – “We call it Lord Fotar,” she moved along the floor track to the project’s negative effects, which could print out powerful sizes. (She has the biggest so far from three to seven feet.) But she also works with other technologies: Everything except signature is me (2023) is a typewriter she programmed, and can enter a word –Star Year– Frivolous letters exchanged by science fiction writers Ursula K. Le Guin and Alice B. Sheldon, who under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr.
Nelson’s new work focuses on a massive array of telescopes, starting as an artist-in-residence based artist-in-residence at Seti Institute, a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit that studies life and intelligence beyond the planet. Last year, she showed photos of the California telescope array at a two-person exhibition held by Luhring Augustine in New York. In a solo show next year at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, she is in the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, inspired by one of the world’s largest telescopes. “I’m in the middle of a struggle,” she said of the ongoing work. “But I’ve anthropomorphized the telescope in some way, treating it almost like an ex-girlfriend.”
