A beautiful trait of Brittany Nelson’s work is that in taking care of others, through photography, she addresses in a radically delicate way the devastating effects on individuals—and I would say also on technology—of compulsory heterosexuality. —Chus Martínez, “I Want to Touch the Cosmos with My Eyes”, Fotogalleriet, upcoming, 2022
Fotogalleriet presents the first solo exhibition in the Nordic countries of American artist Brittany Nelson. Working with photography through chemical techniques from the 19th and 20th centuries, Nelson unveils the queer unconscious of technology.
Brittany Nelson’s work rewrites photography’s history. As one of the most exciting artists of her generation, Nelson presents a critique of Western ideas around the exploration and colonization of space, and poses it against modernity and neoliberal ideals of progress.
Nelson produces some of the world’s largest “bromoil” prints, referring to a technique from the 1920s. Bromoil—a romantically charged handmade process that replaces the silver used for photographic prints with lithographic inks—embodies Nelson’s search for a different relationship between representation and technology. Using this photographic method, she re-contextualizes historical and modern science fiction and technological developments, including NASA images produced by robots known as “rovers.”
The works exhibited at Fotogalleriet are landscape photographs of Mars, a planet often representing both the future and the past in the public imagination. Nelson’s works appropriate images from the vast archives of the Mars rover Opportunity. The robot lived alone on the planet for 14 years and stayed functional well beyond its initial expected lifespan. The artist reclaims an unconscious life to the robot. In thinking of it roaming the planet as a search for companionship, Nelson considers the rover a “queer icon.”
Nelson’s work is interference, a glitch in the hundreds of thousands of files transferred to Earth from 70,404 million km away through space. Her work complicates these images, which are both science fiction in practice and form part of the world-conquering discourse of space travel—a similarly male-dominated realm as photography.
Meet Me At Infinity will include various new productions tackling ecology, futurism, and techno-fetishism. As part of Fotogalleriet’s program, the exhibition addresses and challenges established structures and norms in and outside the art field. It links the artistic program to other fields such as politics, society, health, space exploration and technology. Furthermore, Meet Me At Infinityprescribes that photography and the aesthetic field should not merely act within society, but also pose demands.
Curators Chus Martínez and Xiaoyu Weng, and artist and writer Himali Singh Soin have been invited to contribute texts to the exhibition book.
On the opening night, award-winning novelist and queer legend Gerd Brantenberg will read unpublished texts. Fotogalleriet’s Artistic Director, Dr. Antonio Cataldo, and Director of CAP Saint-Fons (Centre d’art de Saint-Fons) Alessandra Prandin will hold inaugural speeches (Brittany Nelson’s solo I Wish I Had a Dark Seawas held at CAP Saint-Fons in spring 2022 and paved the way for the Oslo exhibition).
Installation at Le CAP, Centre d’art Saint Fons, France
In 2004, the American space agency NASA launched a mission of two rovers to prospect the surface of Mars. The twin vehicles named Spirit and Opportunity were designed to roam the planet for 90 sols (90 Martian days corresponding to 24 hours and 40 minutes each), collecting data on territory, evidence to provide clues on ancient life and water, and other findings that might brace hypotheses of future habitability. Spirit fulfilled its mission and ceded its functions in 2011, outliving its estimated lifespan by seven years, while Opportunity is still wandering the planet today.
Able to clean its solar panels from dust swirled up during Martian storms, the rover was assigned new scientific missions originally unintended and unforeseen. Among the outcomes of these are multiple images taken by Opportunity as it looks back over its path and photographs its own tracks, which are held in NASA’s publicly accessible archives. Auspicious and pioneering as future visions of life on Mars may seem, the images of a lonely rover roaming the surface of this faraway planet, long after completing its mission and abandoned by its twin, evoke a sense of anthropomorphic solitude.
For the work Opportunity, Nelson reproduced one of Opportunity’s photographs in bromoil, a 19th century technique which became popularized by the pictorialist movement. Depicting the deserted Martian landscape, the work evokes both the nostalgia of hand-created, rather than recorded, bromoil photographs, and the futuristic endeavor to make this barren planet inhabitable. Looking at the black-and-white soft-contoured image, brought out by Nelson’s ink brush touching the photographic surface, we may think of humans longing to touch, and eventually inhabit, this extraterrestrial landscape of craters and sand dunes—a longing harnessed by the “pioneers” attempting to create a new habitat for those adventurous and wealthy enough to partake.
Tiptree’s Dead Birds, Page 1 - 6
Glass plate reflective holograms, 2019
James Tiptree Jr., really Alice B. Sheldon, insulated herself with a male pen name and male narrative voices in the 1970’s in order to discuss her closeted sexuality. Working with Sheldon’s biographer, Julie Phillips in Amsterdam, digital scans of a series of six hastily handwritten letters from Sheldon were obtained titled “Tiptree’s Dead Birds”. Writing as Tiptree, she details all of the women who had rejected her in her lifetime. These letters read as an epitaph to a lifetime of isolation. With the original documents subsequently lost, the scans were captured as glass plate refelctive holograms to replace the physical form of the letters, and to provide a window into Sheldon’s alternate universe.
Sol 4,999, Silver-Plated Gelatin Silver Prints, 2018
10 x 8” each, Installation of 20 images
Sol 4,999 references a picture taken by the Opportunity mars rover as the sun rises for the 5,000th time during its extended mission, long after the vehicle was to be discontinued. Appropriating the image, Nelson created a series of halochrome prints, each repeating the same photograph. Bleaching and redeveloping silver gelatin paper, the halochrome process tones black-and-white prints by fusing colloidal silver into solid silver. This chemical stabilizing process raises questions concerning permanence, both of human and other life as well as of artifacts cast in rigid materials for future generations to find and marvel at. The prints also call to mind the way alien artifacts are imagined widely across popular culture, as metal objects with shiny surfaces. In depicting images of the sun, the work points to the medium of photography as a capture of light, while the repeated images formally resemble a fragmentary calendar, an attempt to measure something as abstract as time passing on a desolate planet. For Opportunity, the sun rose and set 5,000 times during 14 years of solitude on Mars. The title of the show points to another form of isolation. WarmWorlds and Otherwise references a science fiction short story collection by Alice B. Sheldon,who wrote under the male pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. In obfuscating her identity, Sheldon insulated herself twice, both protecting herself against the misogynist attitudes cultivated in science fiction circles, and allowing her write about her own lesbian desires. Warm Worlds and Otherwise, the book and the exhibition, highlight desires to tap into other worlds, the serendipity in searching for the unknown, and exercises in abstraction that elude preconceptions while sounding other possible futures.