Joanne Leonard & Brittany Nelson
New York,
Joanne Leonard’s photographs of interiors are celebrations and examinations of the cacophony of domestic settings and many of the now-obsolete technologies of the mid-twentieth century. Shot in the late 1970s and early 1980s, these kitchens, laundry rooms, and bedrooms are filled with the entanglements and jumbled ephemera of lived-in spaces – a sphere that is historically associated with the feminine domain. The images are subtly threaded with the hectic happiness of life and family, and yet they read as crowded, confining, and overwhelming. Leonard’s use of light, and her balance of rich blacks and greys, bring a softness to these images and add a loving caress of appreciation to the overlooked appliances and products of the quotidian.
Joanne Leonard & Brittany Nelson, Installation view, Luhring Augustine, New York
In contrast to these familiar and object-saturated interiors, Brittany Nelson’s photographs are otherworldly, with horizons expanding beyond our planetary borders. Nelson often turns to outer space in her work, employing it as a metaphor for queerness – exploring ideas of isolation and the need for human connection. The works on display in this presentation are from the Allen Telescope Array series, made while Nelson was in residency at the SETI Institute, an organization that is dedicated to searching for life in the universe. While there, she photographed the 42 antennas that compose SETI’s enormous telescope array, roaming the grounds alone at night with a medium-format camera and reversing the telescopes’ outward gaze by searching for them with a hand-held light source. The resulting photographs are at once shocking and soothing; while the enormous scale of the dishes is intimidating, their frontality and open presence imbue them with a sense of acceptance and even trust in the viewer, almost as if they were beings themselves.
