Before officially meeting Séamus Gallagher, I knew who they were, and every now and then, I would pass them walking through downtown Winnipeg. On more than one occasion, they were wearing an excellent yellow suit. And each time, this dash of colour against the dull beige and brown facades of Portage Ave shifted the tenor of my day. A little jolt of visual pleasure, in a city whose harsh climes reduce most of us to down-filled neutrals, is always welcome. Over time, it also struck me as a bit irreverent or even challenging, like a little ripple in our staid visual language, or an invitation, maybe, to play with our own public performances. 

As I’ve learned more about Gallagher’s practice, it’s become clear that they excel at pulling their audience in immediately, and then letting the critical questions their work poses simmer over time. Gallagher’s work is typically gorgeous, in the sense that it’s vivid and saturated, a delicious, over-rich eye candy. It’s also gaudy and strange. Using photography, video, drag, performance and video game aesthetics to create speculative worlds, Gallagher pulls from various visual codes to create entirely new ones. Exaggerated characters pose dramatically against hyperreal, otherworldly backdrops. It can be difficult to determine the exact time or place where scenes take place. The tone is often ambiguous and non-prescriptive – winking but earnest, evasive of any simple read. Their work makes expert use of camp, exploring the fruitful zone of “failed seriousness”¹ that emerges in the wake of unattainable aspiration, and exposing the artifice of the genres and genders that structure our lives.

In Gallagher’s most recent exhibition OH BABY at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, they ask themself: "what would happen if we were all assigned a forest fire at birth?" The beautiful, unsettling future they imagine includes hyper-feminine, hyper-masculine and insect-inspired characters living out a florid range of embodied performance against a backdrop of climate chaos and fragile renewal. Another exhibition, Mother Memory Cellophane (MOMENTA Biennale 2023), takes inspiration from the 1939 World Fair, reprising the advertising persona Miss Chemistry as a haunting symbol of a failed “world of tomorrow,” and cheekily inviting us to imagine our ruined future otherwise. 

Rather than discrete exercises in historical or speculative fiction, Gallagher’s work feels like an ongoing study of expansive aesthetic, queer and more-than-human lineages. Their gift for drawing connections reminds us how structures of feeling stretch and resonate across non-linear time, encouraging us to consider the latent possibilities of any particular moment, while sharpening our view of the present. Such an approach isn’t naively optimistic, but it insists that multiple counter-histories always have and will exist – bubbling up, rupturing and rewriting a world always in-process. Gallagher seems to follow their curiosity like the best science fiction authors do – investigating the realities that shape our lives to point us toward the many immanent, enticing, unfinished alternatives waiting to flourish all around us.

Gallagher grew up in New Brunswick and holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They’re currently completing an MFA at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, but continue to spend part of their time in Halifax. Gallagher has exhibited extensively and they are the recipient of several awards. Most recently, they were the 2023 Atlantic finalist for the Sobey Art Award.

 

 

 

 

 

I get interested in very, very silly things [...] but I treat them very seriously, and I do a lot of research. On the surface level, I think that's the benefit of having this maximalist kind of gaudy aesthetic. It’s quite inviting and silly, but the longer you spend with the work, the more the complexity and criticality comes out.

 

 

 

 

 

How did you get your start as a visual artist?

I grew up in Moncton, New Brunswick, and I just couldn't really relate to the people I knew growing up. So, I started posting on Tumblr quite a bit, and trying to find a community online. Part of that was making very silly drawings that were just about pop culture and the things that I was consuming—mostly 80s new age music and Twin Peaks. I wasn't very good at drawing, but adding images to some of my writing was a way of getting people to notice what I was doing. For several years, I was drawing very, very rough black and white ink drawings. They were always almost comics. And that was how I first started making art, I suppose, in high school and my early 20s. After high school, I started an English degree at McGill University but the environment at McGill was not the right fit for sure. I lasted a year and a half, and then transferred to NSCAD, and that was the correct choice. It was a good pivot.

How did your practice and aesthetic develop at the time?  

I knew I wanted to study photography, but I had no experience and no way of articulating why I wanted to study it. For the first year and a half, I was just making really embarrassing work that I would never show anyone—being forced to do street photography and work in these ways that didn't feel comfortable to me while trying to figure out what it is that I like about photography. Eventually, I took a studio lighting class that opened up a new way of working for me. When I turned the camera toward myself, I found my preferred way of working. I always felt weird about the power dynamics or the agency that comes with documenting or portraying someone else. Once I felt like I didn't have to do that, I started to give myself room to play around and build my own little sets. NSCAD was right across the street from a Dollarama, and I was able to build my own very scrappy sets, rent out classrooms over the weekend and create environments to photograph myself in. There wasn’t too much theory behind the things I was doing, but it was a nice way of trying to find what visual language worked for me. You can see a trajectory from my early work to now that is kind of nice to see on a grand scale.

There’s such a playful, maximalist sensibility in your work, and an interesting mix of material exploration and digital technology. How did you end up working at this intersection of media? 

After my second year at NSCAD, I started taking a lot of digital media courses and building environments digitally with my laptop, and connecting this with my photography. This was a very exciting format for me, not being able to afford a ton of space in Halifax. At the same time, I was thinking about my childhood interest in video games. I used to play this online game RuneScape obsessively as a kid, which was like a cheap knockoff of World of Warcraft. As part of the game, you could go see a Makeover Mage and change your gender for 150 gold coins. As an 11-year-old, I was a regular at the Makeover Mage, uncritically, and it was interesting for me to think about how this funny little gender performance as a kid connected to my interest in drag as an adult. I started bringing together this digital media background with my photo practice through 3D models of drag costumes and masks and headpieces, and found this software called Pepakura that turns 3D models into paper templates that I could cut and score and hot glue together. Eventually, I started wearing them and performing in different photo series.

What happens in that translation from digital to physical for you? What do you find interesting about moving between these modes?

I think it creates some limitations. Every polygon that I modeled would have to be a score or cut on a sheet, so it made this very nostalgic N-64 aesthetic with very rudimentary models. There’s also just a nice balance between these 3D modeling programs and this scrappy material way of working that I'm very partial to—just using an X-Acto knife and hot glue gun to create these costumes. The sets were also just printed images of these virtual worlds I was building. I always liked printing them quite large-scale so you could see the hot glue strands on the pages themselves. It kind of gives a nod to the audience of how these photos are constructed, and makes them look quite unreal. 

It seems to resonate with a scrappy, DIY approach to drag, and making do with what’s available to you.

Definitely. There’s the scrappiness of it all, and also almost like simulacrum. Drag is all about subversion of this performative aspect, and I think it’s quite embedded for me in the process itself.

You’ve spoken on other occasions about your interest in simulacra and copies. Can you tell me more about that?

It’s something that I was so obsessed with in 2019 and I still am, but that was what inspired Thinking of You, Thinking of Me, a work that I’m still very proud of. I was really interested in the idea of cheap imitation without knowing why, and then I came across this essay that talks about how bugs imitate others for protection to seem less desirable to predators, but a lot of them do a really bad job. I was so delighted to hear that it's just bad drag. One theory is that certain organisms mimic different signifiers from multiple other organisms, and that mixing of identifiers keeps them safe by confusing predators. I was interested in how that relates to drag and queer performativity and camp in a way. I think it disrupts that bigoted defence that queerness isn’t natural, but there’s also this embrace of artificiality. Like, I don’t care if it’s truly what it claims to be. 

You’ve also talked often about the importance of camp and the liberatory potential of failure in your work. I love this one interview where you admit that you’re often trying to create something beautiful and thinking you’ve succeeded and then realizing that, for others, it’s actually a bit strange or off-putting. I’m curious about your draw to camp aesthetics and what that slippage or failure offers. 

I still think of that as camp, but I mean, there’s so many different versions of camp now. When in doubt, it’s camp. 

Maybe you have thoughts on that! Maybe the concept’s too broad now. 

No, I love it! But one sort of definition I’ve stuck by is this sincere attempt at reaching a level of glamour that's sort of unreachable, and failing so spectacularly that there's a new visual language that comes from it. I think the potential that failure allows is kind of embedded in camp and something that I have always been drawn to. I work very hard, and I'm very proud of the work I do. But I still think there’s a lot of failure in it. I'm not the most technically skilled artist in the world, and I work so hard with these softwares and technologies, but a lot of them are industry-standard. So whatever I do as an individual will still only attain a certain level. Through that failure, a new aesthetic emerges that I'm really drawn to.

I’ve also noticed an interesting relationship to temporality and world-making in your work. There’s a curious mixture of nostalgic and futuristic aesthetics that kind of seems to unsettle a  conventional sense of time and scale.

I think there's a parallel with these video game technologies, where they've kind of reached a cap in the level of realism, right? It seems like we’re getting closer and closer, but the exponential graph is sort of slowing down. As drag becomes more mainstream, there's been a similar, heightened sort of emphasis on the realism, of finding a twink that can emulate a beautiful young supermodel, for example. These are the parts of both forms of working that I’m the least interested in. I’m interested in the ways these technologies can become something new, almost like a science fiction tool, and not emulate what’s in the real world.

Is there a particular kind of experience you're trying to evoke for your audience? A sense of the uncanny maybe? Or is it more about your own experience of producing this work?

I think my own experience of producing it, but I also think it depends on the project itself. Sometimes, I do like evoking more of a realist virtual environment, but then being able to disrupt it. I use a lot of volumetric video capture, which is basically an old iPad Pro that has a LiDAR depth sensor as well as the video camera to create three-dimensional video that's very low quality, and glitchy. I create these quite sleek video game environments, but then embed this low quality technology as a way of unsettling these beautiful environments. I think uncanny is a fair way to label it, but it depends on the body of work itself.

Does that also involve using technology that comes from different eras?

Definitely. Hodgepodge is always a nice way of working for me. Using a kind of collage approach is a very fun process for making, and I think it does lend itself to creating visual languages that I don’t see utilized. 

Your recent exhibit at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, OH BABY was prompted by an infamous story of a forest fire sparked by a gender reveal explosion in Arizona. Can you tell me more about how this developed into an idea for a body of work?

It’s been a meme for years—gender reveal parties turning into essentially ecological disasters. But I think the one that stuck with me was maybe the most disastrous one: this fire in Arizona in 2017 that burned through 47,000 acres of land. What struck me about it was that a US border patrol officer, whose whole job is upholding these borders, started it and filmed himself doing it. But fire has no regard for these borders that we put up. This first work I created was called “On the ground, in the air, across the water,” which is the slogan on the US Border Patrol career website, and this super upsetting framing of borders as an elemental thing. That was the starting point, and then I think the whole spectacle of it became quite interesting to me. The campy prompt I asked myself while thinking about the work was, “What would it be like to be assigned a forest fire at birth?”

So you had a few different personas in the work? 

Yes, I wanted to create a few different characters that exist in this world—hyper-feminine, hyper-masculine, and then some being more inspired by insects, and they all exist within this undefined future. All have been assigned a forest fire, and live in this imagined future where borders and binaries have collapsed. I really wanted to treat drag as the expansive form that it is.

Are you always the primary subject in your work?

That’s my most comfortable way of working, through a process of trial and error. I set an interval on the camera, and then photograph myself in all these different sorts of poses.

It sounds like quite the process to create the sets and then perform in them. Do you typically work alone? 

Yes, it’s very exhausting. For my most recent exhibition, I stayed here over Christmas break and got special access to the sound stage in the basement of University of Manitoba. I was just non-stop setting up, taking down and photographing. Generally, I like to do it myself. I like to have a more private process. It’s also a humbling process, figuring out the positioning and doing multiple takes. 

And you use a specific imaging process to create these kinds of hyper-realistic, surreal backgrounds?

I use an imaging process called Gaussian splatting. It’s a scanning process for rendering images in 3D. And then I print these images on the cheapest materials possible, and glue the sets together, playing around and organizing them and seeing where to situate myself.

Botanical gardens feature as a backdrop in some of these large-scale images. What was your interest in this setting? 

I went to the botanical gardens so often when I moved to Pittsburgh as a meditative place to visit. But I was also interested in their weird artificiality and colonial history. They were created as this sort of empirical tool of extraction and domination of land. So it’s a mix of very beautiful and colonial space. One of the other videos I included created a 3D model of my own alien botanical garden. I’ve also been interested in how, because of the climate crisis, a lot of plants can only exist in these artificial spaces, which is a result of colonialism itself.

Can you say more about what you’re thinking through in this work about the intersection of the climate crisis and the breakdown of borders and binaries? 

I was reading a lot of science fiction when I started making the work, and revisiting Ursula K LeGuin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which suggests that a carrier bag was the first human technology. It goes against this idea that the spear is the first human-made technology, and undermines this idea of a binary or linear narrative of win-lose, good-bad, hero-villain. I think it allows for messier narratives to exist at once and different histories to co-exist and rub up against each other. But that friction or conflict isn’t the main driving narrative. That’s something I wanted to be in the show itself—to not be prescriptive of what future these characters exist in and whether it’s hopeful or pessimistic. I wanted it to be part of the world we’re in, but allow for some science fiction elements. I also interviewed the gender reveal inventor Jenna Karvunidis, so there was this real-world context as well.

She has some regrets, it sounds like.

Yes, it was really wonderful talking to her. She has regrets, and I think, for quite a few years, she felt a lot of guilt, but now, very understandably, she’s forgiving herself for this trend that she accidentally started in 2008. I read a lot of interviews before I interviewed her myself, where she seemed quite apologetic. This time, she was very honest, and just said, “I did it. It sucks, but I'm not to blame for all these disasters. I didn’t tell people to dye waterfalls pink or whatever.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m wondering about your interest in exploring queer ecologies and futurities in kind of a non-prescriptive way, in this exhibit and works like I wanna feel the heat with somebody, a smaller project you developed during a Banff arts residency. 

One thing I was thinking about while making this project is the anti-queer rhetoric that has really accelerated over the past year and again, that defense of bigotry that’s like, queerness is just not natural. That, combined with the complete disregard for nature from these conservative groups, resonates throughout the exhibition. Something I like to do in my work is build connections. In the world we live in, we're so severed from one another and our own histories and our own communities, and also nature itself. Something that I think resonates with queer ecology is this intention of building relations, both human and non-human, and building relations between our current day and our histories and our futures. That’s something that I think is tied throughout the work itself, definitely.

Are you hoping to push people to think about the politics of gender performance or climate through your work?

I try to be as honest as possible with my politics. I'm a political person, but I don't think it’s super effective for me to make my work just textual, like, these are my politics. But it’s all embedded. It was very intentional for me to bring drag to the forefront at a time when it’s increasingly villainized. It was important for me to give visual nods to drag in previous projects, and treat it as an art form in and of itself. I would hope my work is always political and that my politics are quite evident without making it textually obvious.

There’s also a certain levity and humour in your work that invites us to engage with sometimes difficult subject matter. How do you think about tone? 

I do my best to follow my interests and what I get obsessed with and bring that into my work.  I get interested in very, very silly things—like gender reveals turning into forest fires—but I treat them very seriously, and I do a lot of research. On the surface level, I think that's the benefit of having this maximalist kind of gaudy aesthetic. It’s quite inviting and silly, but the longer you spend with the work, the more the complexity and criticality comes out. 

You’ve played so many different characters and archetypes in your work. Can you tell me more about your relationship to performance?

It’s kind of the same thing as video game avatars as this site of exploration where I can create these new identities. But as I’ve developed more projects, I’ve become more intentional about the personas I’m developing. I think of Claude Cahun, the surrealist self-portraiture artist from the 1930s and 40s, who has a quote that's like “Beneath this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.” It’s this open-ended site of possibility, which is the benefit of drag and connects it to science fiction for me. The more years I spend on it, the better I get at it too, which is exciting for me.

What do you mean by that? Like in terms of personas or technical skills?

I’m figuring out what works with certain projects and what didn’t, and moving forward from the paper mask process that I started with the first few years, and bringing in my make-up skills as a drag performer.

Do you ever perform in drag shows outside of your art practice?

I do, but I keep them separate. As an artist, it’s my job, which is an honour. But having a separate persona gives me a lot more room to embarrass myself and not be as serious with it, right? It's very important to me just as an individual. I don’t want to perform a PJ Harvey song and then feel the need to defend it theoretically. 

Right, and it’s interesting because drag feels so community-based and playful. And then contemporary art lives in this more constraining space in some ways, where your work always has to be justified. 

For sure. When I started blending my interest in drag and video games, I did feel this anxious need, whether it an external thing or just internalized expectation, of defending my work through more academically-verified theorists, but at the same time, that gave me a fruitful foundation for a way to articulate my work. But I also just need that freedom outside my official artistic practice. If I’m feeling kind of burnt out from a project, drag is a way of still feeling creative without needing to talk about it after it's done. It might bomb, and if it does, it's a three minute thing that I'll forget about. It’s liberating.

I’ve noticed that you're very prolific. You've developed several bodies of work in the last six years. Can you share more about your practice and pace?

I appreciate that. I’ve been lucky enough to be supported in my work, and I don't take that lightly, so I do put a lot of pressure on myself and kind of devote all my free time to making work while I have the opportunity. As an artist, everything feels precarious especially when, in Canada, our funding systems feel kind of entirely dependent on who’s in government.

How do you approach time in the studio?

I think it can be less exciting when people come for studio visits because a lot of my work is just focused laptop reading [laughs], and then Google Docs with different points as I revisit and connect ideas. But then, I work a lot with Blender software to create 3D images, and often have 3D printers running making something for an exhibition. So there’s a lot of things going on at once. Then, I’ll rent a space once I’m ready to start shooting.

Do you have a relationship to 2D versus 3D work? Your work’s final format is typically 2D photography, but there’s so much exploration of 3D software and material in the process.

It depends. Costuming is mostly where it enters the 3D realm. But the world-building is typically in a digital context and I tend to stick to this 2D cut out process.

You also had some large textile objects in OH BABY, right?

I did. Again, that was an interesting transition. That piece was a flower that’s been extinct for a million years, but was found perfectly preserved in amber in the 90s. So I created these 3D models out of these images that are available online and then used a program that turns 3D models into sewing patterns. I worked with some angel undergrad students here and hired them to help me to make these large-scale renderings of this extinct flower and then connect them to a timed blower that would inflate and deflate them slowly. In one of the videos in the exhibition, there’s a text about a bouncy castle with a hole in it, and this kind of slow deflation. I wanted to revive this extinct flower, but it never fully inflates. It just kind of breathes.

I’m also wondering what your pop culture diet is like. How does it inform ideas for your work? You seem relatively online, but also able to take up cultural moments on your own time. 

I’m online all the time, unfortunately! But I try to be sincere in what resonates with me and keep those in my mind. It’s usually a few years later I can find a way of tying it back. I sit with it for a while. I think the memes around gender reveal forest fires had their peak in like 2021, and I only started revisiting it in 2023 when the Halifax wildfires were so present. I do think it takes some time to process things, and one interest finds a connection with another. That comes with time and distance as well.

Totally. Like pandemic art. Still too soon. Do you ever encounter a book of essays or a novel about being stuck at home where you’re like, “No, not yet. Maybe never”?  

Oh, I cannot read “together, alone” ever again. I get it, but keep it to yourself, truly, respectfully. I think there’s a new Ari Aster movie set in 2020, and I’m curious about that.

Cautiously optimistic?

I’m not even optimistic [laughs], but I would go see it. 

Has it been interesting to see how your work is read and interpreted once you release it into the world? Your work has both wide appeal but it also takes up niche, cultural references which might elude broader audiences.

Once the work is out there, it’s out of my control in terms of how people choose to frame it, which is just embedded in being an artist. There have been moments when the framing has been very flattening, and it’s really rubbed me the wrong way, but I think most audiences can generally see where I’m coming from. I try to be open in the initial framework of the work. Pop culture references won't be picked up by everybody. People bring their own viewpoints, which is scary but also illuminating.

What projects are you thinking about next? 

I've always been a fan of horror and themes of queer and trans identity, and also just drag. So I’m thinking about ways to bring those things together. So much of my work is just like “What are my interests, and how do they interrelate? And is there a project in that?” So that’s where my mind is right now.  

You’re a horror fan?

Huge fan. 

Any recommendations?

The Substance was a game changer.

Oof yes, still haunting my dreams. And was it you who was talking about Sinners recently?

Oh yeah, I can’t shut up about it. It’s so incredible. So well-researched, so layered, but also within this framework of campy horror.