Nelson often turns to outer space in her work, employing it as a metaphor for queerness – exploring ideas of isolation and the need for human connection. The works on display in this presentation are from the Allen Telescope Array series, made while Nelson was in residency at the SETI Institute, an organization that is dedicated to searching for life in the universe. While there, she photographed the 42 antennas that compose SETI’s enormous telescope array, roaming the grounds alone at night with a medium-format camera and reversing the telescopes’ outward gaze by searching for them with a hand-held light source. The resulting photographs are at once shocking and soothing; while the enormous scale of the dishes is intimidating, their frontality and open presence imbue them with a sense of acceptance and even trust in the viewer, almost as if they were beings themselves.