Mother Memory Cellophane – Séamus Gallagher

A phantasmic theatre haunted by past visions of the future

Montreal, September 6, 2023 – From September 8, 2023, to February 4, 2024, for the 18th MOMENTA Biennale de l’image, the McCord Stewart Museum presents Mother Memory Cellophane, an exhibition by multimedia artist Séamus Gallagher. Imagined as a phantasmic theatre that includes a video projection and a series of five lenticular photographs, this installation was inspired by an event that took place at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, titled “World of Tomorrow.” To mark the occasion, the DuPont company presented Miss Chemistry, a model meant to personify Chemistry and serve as a living advertisement for the world premiere of nylon stockings. Personifying this allegory, which symbolizes both stereotypical femininity and the period’s synthetic material culture, Séamus Gallagher invites us to reflect on this plastic embodiment of the woman of the future and the omnipresence of synthetic materials in our contemporary lives.

“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,” explains Séamus Gallagher.

Object photographs

Mother Memory Cellophane

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 their 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.

“I’ve been really preoccupied the past few years with these ideas of hauntology, and ghosts, and how plastics operate as a form of haunting. This exhibition has given me a chance to try to connect all these moving parts within the framework of the 1939 New York World’s Fair and the material of nylon. I hope the public can sit with it for a while and see the threads between these dots. It was really important to me to incorporate lenticular printing throughout this exhibition. It’s a style of printing where the image changes depending on the angle of which it is viewed. I wanted this technical process to also reflect the themes of haunting, and this dichotomy of what is visible versus what is present,” says Séamus Gallagher.

Séamus Gallagher’s work explores the transformation of identities through the interweaving of physical, virtual and online worlds. Inspired by drag culture and the aesthetics of video games, Gallagher designs 3D models and materializes them in paper. The artist creates costumes and sets, as extravagant as they are precarious, and translates them into paper templates, in which they immerse themselves and their alter ego, Séamus, for the duration of a photo or film shoot. Masquerade here is a slippery, queer place where imperfect metamorphoses take place—imitations full of limitations, bugs and confusions, sometimes doomed to failure.

Exhibition views

“The McCord Stewart Museum continues its 10-year partnership with MOMENTA Biennale de l’image by making its spaces available to talented emerging artists. Invoking an avatar from the past to remind us how the advent of nylon was celebrated almost 100 years ago, Séamus Gallagher urges us to reflect on the insidious, even deadly, omnipresence of microplastics in living organisms. They offer a singular vision of ecology that resonates not only with our institution’s strategic objectives, but also with the concerns of the general public,” says Anne Eschapasse, President and CEO of the McCord Stewart Museum.

Biography of Séamus Gallagher

Séamus Gallagher is a lens-based artist currently living in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia. Infusing queer aesthetics with self-portraiture, video game engines, and set construction, Séamus explores the limits of representation, and failure as a form of liberation. Gallagher’s 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.

They are 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. They are a finalist for the 2023 Sobey Arts Award.

Credits and curatorial team

Exhibition presented as part of MOMENTA Biennale de l’image and produced in partnership with the McCord Stewart Museum.

Artist: Séamus Gallagher
Curator: Ji-Yoon Han, guest curator, MOMENTA Biennale de l’image

Séamus Gallagher thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for its financial support.

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Press Release PDF
Press Release WORD

Press images

Object photographs
Exhibition views
Portraits of Séamus Gallagher