Brittany Nelson Turns a Radio Telescope into a Meditation on Memory and Desire

As global interest in space exploration grows, the cultural meaning of looking outward has shifted. In her recent work, Brittany Nelson approaches one of astronomy’s most advanced listening devices not as a symbol of technological power, but as an emotional object. By focusing on the vast radio telescope at Green Bank Observatory, she suggests that the search for signals from beyond Earth is also a meditation on how we project desire, memory, and hope into the unknown.

The timing feels apt. Public fascination with space exploration has returned with renewed force, driven by both state agencies and private enterprise. Yet Nelson’s focus is less on conquest or discovery than on the psychological terrain beneath scientific endeavor. Her work proposes that the machinery designed to detect signals from distant galaxies also amplifies distinctly human emotions.

Trained as a photographer, Nelson is known for reworking early analog techniques such as mordançage, bromoil, and tintype. These processes, rooted in the 19th and early 20th centuries, carry with them a history of experimentation, accident, and chemical transformation. In her hands, they become a way of collapsing temporal boundaries: archaic methods frame contemporary scientific research, and the darkroom becomes a counterpart to the observatory.

At Green Bank, the immense radio telescope—an engineering feat calibrated to capture faint cosmic emissions—appears in Nelson’s photographs as both monumental and strangely vulnerable. The structure’s latticed steel arcs across the frame in gelatin silver prints that emphasize texture and shadow. Its vast dish, designed to listen to the universe, becomes a surface onto which viewers inevitably project their own narratives.

That tension between measurement and imagination intensifies in Nelson’s new video work, Rebecca (2026). Shot on location at the observatory, the film draws on literary and cinematic echoes of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca and Alfred Hitchcock’s subsequent adaptation. In those earlier works, absence exerts a haunting force; memory becomes an architecture that shapes the present.

Nelson adapts that mood to a technological setting. The soundtrack incorporates the high-pitched hum of the telescope’s liquid-helium pumps, their mechanical rhythm evoking something close to a heartbeat. Visually, the film shifts between still, composed 35mm images of the telescope and increasingly unstable handheld sequences. At moments, the camera seems almost to recoil from—or lunge toward—the towering structure.

The narrative is spare but emotionally charged. Nelson has described the telescope as akin to a former lover, an object of fixation and frustration. Framed in this way, the search for extraterrestrial contact becomes a metaphor for a failed relationship: signals are sent out, responses awaited, silence endured. The cosmic scale does not diminish intimacy; it magnifies it.

This reframing places Nelson within a broader lineage of artists who interrogate the cultural symbolism of scientific tools. Telescopes, satellites, and laboratory apparatus have long stood as emblems of progress and rational inquiry. Yet they also embody hope, anxiety, and the desire for transcendence. By situating herself at a working research site, Nelson resists romanticizing science while refusing to strip it of its emotional dimension.

Her practice also speaks to photography’s enduring entanglement with truth claims. From its inception, the medium has been associated with evidence and verification. Nelson’s revival of historical techniques complicates that assumption. Chemical stains, tonal shifts, and deliberate imperfections remind viewers that every image is mediated, shaped by both material process and subjective intention.

The exhibition unfolds within the context of the List Center’s long-running support for emerging artists. But beyond institutional frameworks, Nelson’s project resonates with a wider cultural condition. In an era defined by vast data flows and constant communication, the possibility of not being heard—of sending signals into silence—carries particular weight.

The Green Bank telescope listens to the cosmos for patterns that might indicate intelligent life. Nelson listens to the instrument itself, treating its infrastructure as an index of human longing. In doing so, she suggests that the history of science is inseparable from the history of desire.

The exhibition runs from January 15 to March 29, 2026, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet its thematic reach extends far beyond a single gallery. By bringing early photographic alchemy into dialogue with contemporary astrophysics, Nelson asks a question that is as old as both art and astronomy: when we look outward into the vastness, what are we truly searching for?