“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 Birds, new 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 Fotogalleriet 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 – Ursula
LeGuin – for whom Sheldon developed deep and unspoken feelings. 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 sea, a 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.”
the full press release available here.