The emptiness of outer space incites a surprising kind of yearning in Brittany Nelson. “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” her 2024 show at PATRON Gallery in Chicago, drew on her interests in science-fiction archives, travelogue videos, and early photochemistry techniques—all soundtracked by a heartrending Bonnie Raitt ballad that mines the desire in unrequited love (“I can’t make you love me if you don’t / you can’t make your heart feel something it won’t”).
Nelson’s engagement with the erotics of extraterrestrial subject matter was inspired by an unusual muse: the storied Mars rover, Opportunity. “I call her a lesbian icon,” the artist said, adopting the feminine pronoun that NASA attached to the robot during its 2004–18 service on the Red Planet. “She’s one of the farthest-roaming robots we’ve ever sent off-planet, and she took an insane amount of images,” Nelson told me when I visited her studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. “She was on an expedition alone, doing these butch rock experiments while [casting] glances across the landscape, which is an absolute lesbian trope: the longing glance, never to close the distance.”
To lend pathos to Opportunity’s images, Nelson printed composites of them using the bromoil process, an early 20th-century technique that gives photographs a more ethereal, painterly look. Source pictures from NASA “are so amazing but are only shared on science-y, techno-fetishy blogs,” she said, noting that they tend to be treated as data sets more than aesthetic entities. “I wanted to put the romanticism back in the images.”
She also found metaphorical resonance in more personal terms. Recalling her upbringing in a “cultural vacuum” in Montana, Nelson said, “I started thinking about having to reverse-engineer what it was like to be a gay person stuck in a very isolated environment. Then all of these parallels with space exploration and sci-fi became apparent.”
Brittany Nelson: everything but the signature is me, 2023.
Photo Evan Jenkins/Courtesy the Artist and PATRON Gallery, Chicago
In her studio, secreted within a former military supply base dating back to World War I, Nelson works with a giant Fotar photo enlarger from the 1950s—“we call it Lord Fotar,” she said—that moves along floor tracks to project negatives, allowing for prints of formidable size. (Her largest so far is three by seven feet.) But she also works with other technologies: everything but the signature is me (2023) is a typewriter she programmed to type a single word—Starbear—culled from flirty letters exchanged by sci-fi writers Ursula K. Le Guin and Alice B. Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr.
Nelson’s new work focuses on enormous telescope arrays, started as an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute, a Silicon Valley–based nonprofit studying the presence of life and intelligence beyond Earth. Last year, she showed photographs of a telescope array in California in a two-person exhibition (with Joanne Leonard) at Luhring Augustine in New York. For a solo show next year at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, she is making work inspired by one of the world’s largest radio telescopes, at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. “I’m in the middle of it, struggling,” she said of her work in progress. “But I’m personifying the telescope in some way, almost treating it like an ex-girlfriend.”
