On Monday, April 14, 2025, at 7:00 pm, Quartz Studio is pleased to present To Leave Is To Return, a project by the American artist Brittany Nelson (Great Falls, U.S., 1984), conceived specifically for the space, in the context of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival.

Created using a screen capture from the film Solaris (1972), directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, a large-scale silver gelatin print depicts the ocean outside of the window of a spaceship. Based on the science fiction novel of the same name by Stanislaw Lem, Solaris details the story of a research crew who has been attempting to communicate with the oceanic planet, which they discover to be a sentient being. The attempts have been futile, and the crew can only view the ocean longingly from a distance, until a new communication attempt sparks the planet to send recreations of people from each crew member’s memories and subconscious to haunt them aboard the ship. The image of the spaceship window has been printed and recaptured on high-speed analog film by Nelson and developed with chemistry which causes the silver grains of the film to clump together. The result is an image that feels delicate, almost ephemeral, and appears to be made of static or sand grains. This enormous analog print, exposed and hand developed by the artist in her studio in New York City, serves as the focus of the exhibition. 

In addition, Brittany Nelson produced an audio artwork that will be comprised of field recordings made at the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in northern California. The ATA consists of 42 radio telescopes built specifically for research to look for signals from extra-terrestrial intelligence. When the viewer enters the space, they will be immersed in the sounds of the choreographed buzzing and clanking of the telescopes as they search for signs of life.

The work Mordançage 10 is produced using the historic Mordançage photo chemical process. This technique creates a violent reaction between the chemistry and the silver contained in the darkroom paper, causing the gelatin layer of the paper to come loose to form textures, veils, and colors. This is a new work from a larger series comprising hundreds of images, where the artist imagines each print as the creation of an alien landscape. Nelson considers this particular work to both reflect the living topography of the oceanic planet Solaris and the longing to connect to the alien life form that exists far out of reach, as well as serving as the “phantom” that haunts the viewer in the exhibition. Both works expand on the artist’s interest in dissecting the human desire to connect with others across the dark vacuum of space, and our inability to do so even when we are in close proximity. Nelson takes the starting point of Solaris in the exhibition to also discuss photographic history. The human replicas haunting the crew members are created solely of subjective personal memories, much like a compilation of images. To the artist, the ghosts are living photographs.

Brittany Nelson

Brittany Nelson (Great Falls, U.S., 1984. The artist explores 19th-century photographic chemistry techniques and science fiction to address themes of loneliness, isolation, and distance in the LGBTQ community and its parallels with space exploration. Her work has been exhibited at Luhring Augustine (New York, NY), KIASMA (Helsinki, Finland), Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm, Sweden), Le CAP - Centre d’art (Saint Fons, France), Fotogalleriet (Oslo, Norway), Die Ecke (Santiago, Chile), Sonnenstube (Lugano, Switzerland), Trondheim Kunstmuseum (Trondheim, Norway), 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) and The International Print Center (New York, NY), among others. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital Foundation Grant in Visual Arts and the Fish/Pearce Award for process-based work from The Print Center (Philadelphia, PA). Nelson was an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2017 and a current Artist in Residence at the SETI Institute. Her work has been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Art In America, Frieze, Mousse, and Cultured Magazine. The artist is represented by Patron Gallery, Chicago.