Séamus Gallagher: OH BABY
Sobey Art Award finalist Séamus Gallagher brilliantly twins themes of gender and climate change in their largest show to date, OH BABY, at the AGNS.
Using a “maximalist aesthetic,” drag imagery and tools from sewing machines to video game engines, Gallagher builds a striking sci-fi world very much connected to our own. The exhibition is full of wonder and playfulness with undercurrents of fear and anxiety.
OH BABY begins with a captivating glow-in-the-dark sculpture of a 3-D printed eagle, who eats the liver of Prometheus as he is forever punished for bringing fire to humans, according to Greek mythology.
Fire is central to OH BABY.
The show has its roots in a 2017 forest fire caused by a border patrol agent in Arizona at his baby’s gender reveal party. He used the explosive Tannerite to hit a target that would explode in blue powder. Instead, he sparked a fire that burned almost 47,000 acres, the largest but not the only incendiary disaster at a gender reveal party.
The agent’s job was to protect borders but fire knows no boundaries, says Gallagher. They were struck by “our disregard for land” and the “ancient upholding of gender binaries.”
At the core of this exhibition are two videos in separate darkened rooms with the show circling around them in connected sculptures, large prints, set pieces and a choir of singers – all Gallagher in exotic, exquisitely done make-up – on separate screens singing like a Greek chorus.
The enchanting, colour-saturated video, Peep Show, depicts a post-apocalyptic fantasy world where created characters are well-equipped to survive. They live under a glass dome in a primeval garden where plants are forever rising and falling.
Blurred, fluttering figures in elaborate drag costumes flit around an old boom box that plays Gallagher’s interview with Jenny Karvunidis, who unintentionally invented gender reveal parties in 2008. In 2008 Karvunidis was pregnant and trying to reconcile with her mother when she held a birthday party and hid a clue to gender inside a cake. This crazy, turquoise duck cake, like a rubber duck with large red lips and golf ball eyes, inspired Gallagher to float duck cake figures on the garden’s waters. Karvunidis tells Gallagher she is horrified by the extravagance and environmental damage of these parties.
As a lawyer based in California, she is also shocked by the number of anti-trans bills. She says in the subtitles: “I hope this is just a very dark period that’s happening, but they’ve risen in tandem with the visibility of trans people, which I think has also been the support of trans people. So these lawmakers are scrambling to tamp down a tide they cannot stop.”
Gallagher, who is non-binary, left Kjipuktuk/Halifax in 2024 to do a master of fine arts degree on a full scholarship at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. With the current politics in the United States, they left and are studying at the University of Manitoba in Treaty 1 Territory/Winnipeg.
While in Pittsburgh, Gallagher began taking 3D scans of botanical gardens which fascinate them as relics of colonial collecting and, today, as repositories of endangered or extinct plant life.
Gallagher brings an extinct flower to life in a large stitched sculpture, strychnos electri, 2025, that balloons up like the inflatable tubes at car lots. The yellow and orange spotted flower, also featured in Peep Show, rises up for 15 seconds then falls back for 30; it never fully inflates; it can never be fully resuscitated.
The 10-minute video on the ground, in the air, across the water, an anchor project at Nocturne in 2024, features the cacti and desert of Arizona with an overall, blurry, bleached landscape. It is the story of the 2017 gender reveal fire and about how technologies fail us.
“I was thinking about the technology I used to create the scans and thinking of how the technology limits our framework of what we’re understanding and seeing,” says Gallagher. “The sky was orange from the forest fire in Halifax and my phone couldn’t get the colour. Technology can fail us even though we see it as objective and truthful.”
The fun and playful piece about disaster, yesterday’s empires/tomorrow’s apologies, is a monumental ocean-blue locket in carved flowers, opened up to reveal shifting images of the Arizona landscape before and during the 2017 explosion.
Throughout the exhibition, Gallagher reveals their stage tricks, displaying the drag queens’ elaborate wigs and exhibiting a costume modelled after an historic fireman’s costume, the billowing grey fabric suggesting smoke. “With OH BABY I wanted to move drag more to the forefront. It is a powerful tool in an art context and it is almost a science fiction, a maximalist aesthetic I like. It’s useful as a tool for storytelling.”
OH BABY curator and Art Gallery of Nova Scotia chief curator David Diviney, loves the clarity and complexity in Gallagher’s work. “I’ve always marvelled at Séamus’s ability to take a wide range of complex ideas and visual elements and bring them together in such a seamless way,” he says. “In OH BABY they present a new series of work that draws connections between issues and concerns around gender, the environment, borders, and technologies, to name some. I couldn’t think of a more timely conversation.”
About the Artist
Séamus 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.
This exhibition has been supported by the Patron Supporters of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Jules Chamberlain, and Benjamin Bridge.
Written by Elissa Barnard. Images by RAW Photography.
About the Author
Elissa Barnard is a freelance arts journalist in Halifax, NS. For 35 years she was an arts and entertainment writer for the Chronicle Herald specializing in the visual arts and theatre. She has a BA in English with honours from Dalhousie University and studied creative writing at the University of Windsor, Windsor, ON. She received a silver Atlantic Journalism Award in 2015 for her article on artist Mary Pratt, whose retrospective was at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, for the Herald Magazine.