Monograph dedicated to American artist Brittany Nelson, including documentation, visual contributions, and
comprehensive essays.
Brittany Nelson: Out of the Everywhere brings
together newly commissioned texts by art historian and curator Lars Bang
Larsen, curator and writer Stefanie Hessler, and poet and writer Quinn
Latimer. The comprehensive essays highlight the artist Brittany
Nelson's work and veer into topics of queer abstraction, the politics of
representation, feminist science fiction, space travel, and isolation. The
book further includes visual contributions by artists Danielle Dean and
Gala Porras-Kim, and a performance script by Gordon Hall. It is designed
by Lauren Thorson of Studio-Set.
Brittany Nelson appropriates and distorts processes from 19th century
photography to question representation as photographic ideal. In
chemically manipulating traditional techniques, such as mordançage and
tintype, she causes unprecedented reactions in the materials, which result
in extraordinary abstract imagery. In continuation of feminist and queer
abstraction, she unfetters photography's constraints of resemblance to
real-world referents, to include technological utopias, spaceflight and
time travel, and feminist science fiction, particularly the writing of
Alice B. Sheldon—who wrote under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr. to
insulate herself against the misogynist attitudes cultivated in science
fiction circles, and allowing her write about her own lesbian desires.
In her most recent practice, Nelson borrows from found material such as
NASA photographs of the surface of Mars. By applying techniques such as
the pictorial bromoil method to these images, she translates between
analogue and digital media, resulting in magnificent prints that warp not
only the surface and constitutive photographic features but also question
the content on view.
Brittany Nelson (born 1984 in Great Falls, Montana, USA, lives and works
in Richmond, Virginia) works with 19th century photographic
chemistry techniques to address themes of feminist
a science fiction
and queer abstraction. She received her MFA in photography from the
Cranbrook Academy of Art, and her Bachelor of Arts from Montana State
University. She is the recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Grant in
Visual Arts and a Theo Westenberger Foundation Grant for advancing women
in the arts. She has previously exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary
Art Detroit (Detroit, MI), The Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York, NY),
The Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI), The Newcomb Art Museum
(New Orleans, LA), Patron Gallery (Chicago, IL), Morgan Lehman (New York,
NY), Harnett Museum of Art (Richmond, VA), The International Print Center
(New York NY), among many others. Nelson was a 2017 artist in residence at
the Headlands Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA) and the recipient of
the Fish/Pearce Award for process-based work from the Print Center
(Philadelphia, PA). Her work has been featured in publications such as Art
In America, Frieze, The New Yorker, Collector
Daily, and Aesthetica.
