Mother Memory Cellophane by Séamus Gallagher

MOMENTA Biennale de l’image - 18th Edition

Masquerades: Drawn to Metamorphosis

A phantasmagoric theatre haunted by past visions of the future

September 8, 2023 - February 4, 2024

This Séamus Gallagher's MOMENTA installation was inspired by an event that took place at the 1939 New York World’s Fair entitled “World of Tomorrow" where DuPont company presented it's "Wonder World of Chemistry" exhibit with a specific emphasis on introducing their new product nylon to the public. Their major attraction was a model called "Miss Chemistry" who wore nylon hosiery and demonstrated its durability and elasticity to the Fair's attendance.

With this installation, Séamus Gallagher presents an imagined phantasmagoric theatre that includes a video projection and a series of five lenticular photographs with the Miss Chemistry theme weaving through his entire work. His Miss Chemistry is a plastic embodiment of a woman that reflects the omnipresence of synthetic materials in our contemporary lives and projects that into the future.

Personifying this allegory, which symbolizes both stereotypical femininity and the period’s synthetic material culture, Séamus Gallagher invites the audience to reflect on this plastic embodiment of the woman of the future and the omnipresence of synthetic materials in our contemporary lives.

Séamus Gallagher explains:

“As microplastics become increasingly prominent in our body, the borders of ourselves and these materials get a bit looser, similar to how Miss Chemistry was viewed as the plastic woman of the future. We’re all a bit of Miss Chemistry now, so I wanted to use these ideas as a foundation for the show. In performing as this ghost of Miss Chemistry for the exhibition, I wanted to think about the ways in which we’re all haunted by these old futures of the past, and what responsibilities we might have to these ghosts.”

The year after the 1939 World’s Fair, a survey ranked Mother, Memory and Cellophane as the most beautiful words in the English language. In his work, Séamus Gallagher appropriates these words to create a mashup of stereotypical femininity and synthetic material culture in a drag reincarnation of Miss Chemistry—or, more specifically, her ghost.

Séamus Gallagher’s work explores the transformation of identities through the interweaving of physical, virtual and online worlds. He designs 3D models and materializes them in paper. The artist creates costumes and sets, as extravagant as precarious, and translates them into paper templates.

Séamus Gallagher is a lens-based artist currently living in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia. His work has been shown at the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, the Portrait Gallery of Canada, and the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, among others. He is a recipient of the Scotiabank 2022 New Generation Photography Award, the 2022 Nova Scotia Emerging Artist Recognition Award, and the 2019 BMO 1st Art Award, and a finalist for the 2023 Sobey Arts Award.