Séamus Gallagher - by David Diviney (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Sé amus Gallagher: OH BABY combines photography video, drag, speculative fiction, sculpture, and costuming to interrogate ideas of gender and the environment, using a forest fire that broke out in Arizona in 2017 following a gender reveal explosion as a spark of inspiration.

Considering this trend of gender reveal parties turning into natural disasters, Sé amus Gallagher: OH BABY imagines what it might mean to be assigned a forest fire at birth amid a collapsing climate. Using a range of image-making techniques, Gallagher examines the ways in which human made technologies and ideas frame our worldviews and fail us as a result. They work from the belief that various histories, narratives, and ideas can (and must) coexist: the camp and the critical, the past and the future, the natural and the other.

Sé amus Gallagher is a lens-based artist living between Treaty 1 Territory/Winnipeg and Kjipuktuk/Halifax. Using drag, self-portraiture, video game engines, and set construction, they are interested in camp, the limits of representation, and failure as a form of liberation.

Gallagher's work has been presented in group and solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada, the Locarno Film Festival, the McCord Stewart Museum, and MOCA Toronto, among other contexts.

Gallagher is the recipient of the 2024 William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists, the Scotiabank 2022 New Generation Photography Award, the 2022 Nova Scotia Emerging Artist Recognition Award, and the 2019 BMO 1st Art! Award. In 2023, they were the Atlantic finalist for the Sobey Art Award.

Review Quotes

"Séamus Gallagher's brilliant and beguiling art is a visual incitation -- a welcome provocation to draw our gaze closer into queerly uncanny worlds unburdened by traditional boundaries of gender, sexuality and societal expectations"

--Sobey Prize jury citation

About the Author

David Diviney is the Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. His interest in the expanded histories and legacies of conceptual art has led to several exhibitions, such as David Askevold: Once Upon a Time in the East (2011), The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968-1978 (2016), and Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler: No More Boring Art (2025). His writing on the art of the 1960s and '70s, contemporary art, and visual culture has been published widely in journals and catalogues.