Weekend Portfolio: Brittany Nelson
Mordançage
“Brittany Nelson’s work brings to mind such ghostly images, which appear to be referentially pointing toward a this-worldly here, yet at closer view waver toward an otherworldly there. Drawing on the history of abstraction and the way it has evaded capture by pictorial figurations and linguistic signifiers, in Nelson’s work, the boundaries between science fiction and reality turn out to be fickle lines of make-believe rather than actual divisions….
Mordançage is an alternative photographic process created in the 1960s, its psychedelic features resonating with the zeitgeist. The underlying technique is etch-bleach, a late-nineteenth-century method used to reverse film negatives into positives. Negative to positive, a few toxic drips to solubilize apparently fixed imagery. In suspending representation as pictorial ideal, Nelson breaks with the traditions of photography and technical mastery in the conventional sense. No more “perfect” pictures. Her unfettering of photography’s constraints of resemblance to real-world referents presses on with the legacies of feminist and queer abstraction. A body that is not depicted cannot be assaulted, cannot be made to fit “natural” categories. Apparent markers of difference in gender and sexuality, of non-compliance with heterosexual norms, have been exploited in the criminalization of homosexuality and the stigmatization of victims of the AIDS crisis. In abandoning claims of universalism and readability of gender and sexuality, queer abstraction sidesteps the violence inherent in this visual regime.”
–Stefanie Hessler, Brittany Nelson: Out Of The Everywhere
To view more of Brittany’s work, visit her website here.
