The artist appropriates ancient photographic techniques to address the genres of feminist science fiction and queer abstraction.
By focusing on the concept of anomalies in the photographic process, the artist broaches the question of representation, of the photographic ideal and of the representation of reality.
Nelson’s works are based on images from NASA’s archives, as well as on the stories of writers like Alice B Sheldon – who wrote under a male pseudonym.
The artist presents a landscape combining utopias, space-time travel, science fiction and feminist theories.
The exhibition includes existing works as well as new productions by the American artist, who spent few weeks as artist-in-residence in Saint-Fons in March 2022.
For her first solo exhibition in France, at the CAP Saint-Fons, the American artist Brittany Nelson will be presenting works from the series Starbear and Tiptree’s Dead Birdsnew productions and a new video which will be shown for the first time at the Art Centre.
“I wish I had a dark sea” paves the way for the retrospective that will be devoted to her at the Fotogaleriet in Oslo (Norway) in autumn 2022.
The exhibition is built around the figure of Alice B. Sheldon, known under the male pseudonym of James Tiptree – a prolific author of science-fiction novels in the 1970s – who was closeted. Desire, gender identity and the great loneliness hidden behind an alter ego are at the heart of her correspondence with another successful writer feelings – Ursula LeGuin – for whom Sheldon developed deep and unspoken.
For several years, Nelson has been interested in this rich corpus and has conducted research in the vast archives of the feminist science-fiction collection at the University of Oregon. The result is the gelatin silver prints of the Starbear series, presented at the CAP in large-format prints, where the artist erases the text to leave only the words of affection intended for LeGuin, like furtive appearances on the photographic surface. In “I wish I had a dark sea”, which gives its title to the exhibition, the artist inverts the image, treating the text as a landscape where words float on a vast black surface, a dark seaa desert inhabited by Sheldon’s solitude.
The pages of the writer’s notebook emerge from areas of light or shadow in the Tiptree’s Dead Birds series, where holographic reproduction – an ancient process where refraction and diffraction create optical illusions – gives a new dimension to the text, a depth that is both formal and symbolic. As letters from the past that speak of the future, the holograms bring us still closer to Sheldon’s intimate universe. She referred to the women she loved (but who rejected her) as “dead birds,” consolidating the feeling of an unfulfilled desire.
Queer abstraction, SF, the history of photography and the appropriation of images taken from space explorations coexist and respond to each other in Nelson’s work. science fiction – the place of anticipation – is the place of all possibilities for feminist authors; a space to feed the queer imagination and to draft the story of new ways of life. Brittany Nelson’s work is part of this legacy, which challenges a standardized system of producing images and reading the world. Using ancient techniques for the representation of reality, she speaks of the future, be it a NASA probe’s solitary wanderings in space or the isolation of a woman forced into a sexual identity that was not her own.
Sheldon’s epistolary journey echoes the long journey of the Opportunity rover. In Opportunity last Image, a contact sheet print, the artist stages the last image sent by the probe after many years of solitary explorations on Mars (the original mission was only supposed to last three months). This last “breath” is an incomplete and mysterious image, where the static gray is completed by a black band. Incommunicability, inadequacy. End of transmission.
Nelson appropriates the image and reproduces it in different shades of gray and intensities of light, in search of the horizon line of a distant landscape, to detect a message that never reached its destination. The history of photography, metaphor and science-fiction converge in this image, which in itself condenses (the obsessions) and the themes dear to the artist.
Tintype, bromoil, mordançange are examples of the techniques of Brittany Nelson’s universe; they are rare and only practiced today by a handful of experts. Nelson masters these processes, but only to a certain degree; she even alters their course because it is not enough to resurrect an old technique – says the artist – it must be updated and made into something new, relevant (…). I have a deep knowledge of the history of photography and where these techniques come from, and then I decide to ignore it.
The history of photography, with its scientific protocols, is the ideal terrain to re-examine both the entire tradition of image production and a politics of representation. My actions are a queering of the material – insists Nelson, because the introduction of an error, an anomaly into the process is symbolically a refusal to comply with the rule, to work towards its collapse.
In the new video I can hardly bear when it’s over, I can hardly bear when it starts, the world’s largest telescope also collapses into a cloud of dust. The words of Alice Sheldon appear again, an ode to desire and its incommunicability: “I seem to have done all my traveling in countries that no longer exist”.
Brittany Nelson’s images take us elsewhere, both geographically and temporally, and the photograph – the quintessential witness of the past, that has been – is transformed here into a vision of the future.
At CAP – Center d’arts plastiques de Saint-Fons, Lyon
until May 22, 2022