It took a spot on the shortlist of Canada’s biggest prize in visual art — and an international-headline-grabbing wildfire in Arizona — for Séamus Gallagher to finally get the hometown show they deserve.
Originally from Moncton, but based in Halifax since the nascent days of their career, the self-described media artist is one of the biggest names in today’s national visual arts scene — and has the resume to back it up. But when their show OH BABY opens at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia this month, it’ll be the first time Halifax has hosted a solo exhibition of Gallagher’s works since they mounted a one-week student show at NSCAD University.
Due to Gallagher’s stature, it feels fitting that their overdue hometown debut will be held at Atlantic Canada’s largest gallery. They have already exhibited at the likes of Montreal’s McCord Stewart Museum and MOCA Toronto. In their NSCAD University days, Gallagher won the school’s prestigious Starfish Student Art Award for outstanding work. That’s all before they landed on the Sobey Art Award shortlist in 2023 — a move that cemented their status as one of the most need-to-know names in Canadian art today.
“People sort of address me as, like, ‘Sobey Finalist’ when introducing me, which is a funny little thing — my last name is Sobey Finalist,” Gallagher says with a laugh.
Though Gallagher’s career has been on the up and up since its early days, the artist is fascinated with failure.
“I am always interested in … what can come out of a sincere attempt of reaching some sort of form of visual language and just failing so spectacularly that something new is created.”
In the case of OH BABY, failure was a jumping-off point, where the “something new” that Gallagher references is a dream world (or a nightmare). The show’s original inspiration — that headline-grabbing wildfire — was the accidental result of a 2017 gender reveal in Arizona. The speculative fiction aspect of the show comes into play here: Instead of being assigned a gender at birth, OH BABY imagines what it could mean to have a forest fire assigned at birth, while the climate continues to collapse.
The wildfire that spawned OH BABY isn’t an anomaly.
“Other gender reveal parties have caused plane crashes and waterfalls being poisoned,” Gallagher says, noting that destruction of the natural world at these gatherings has become a trend within itself.
“Part of this exhibition includes some audio of an interview I did back in October with the inventor of gender reveal parties, who has since gone on record [that he regrets] starting the trend. But I wanted to have this origin, starting point, and map out how it went from this very quaint, little cake celebration to just gaudy explosions,” says Gallagher. “I didn’t want to leave it at mocking this trend, but sort of examining the starting point and how it got to where it is — and where it might be in the future.”
Of course, like all Gallagher shows, the conversation doesn’t stop there.
“The works in OH BABY draw connections between issues and concerns around gender, the environment and climate change, borders and technologies, to name some,” says AGNS chief curator David Diviney, giving a list of exhibit themes that could double as newspaper subheadings. “I couldn’t think of a more timely conversation.”
Diviney says he’s been following Gallagher’s work since 2018.
“Since their days at NSCAD University, I’ve always marvelled at Séamus’s unique ability to take a wide range of complex ideas and visual elements and bring them together in such a seamless way.”
Diviney sees OH BABY as Gallagher doubling down on what they do best. The show overflows with media that feels traditional to a gallery space — like photography, sculpture and video — as well as media that skews decidedly outsider-y, like drag and the aforementioned speculative fiction.
But using unexpected art forms isn’t the only way a Gallagher show is unique. There’s also Gallagher’s love of video game aesthetics — informing how many of the works in OH BABY look — and the artist’s love of camp,which chafes against gallery convention.
“I think on a visual level, camp is often quite gaudy [and] over-the-top, which are things that I’m very partial to,” they say. “I always see it as this very sincere and scrappy attempt of an unattainable level of glamour. And through this failed attempt, there’s a new visual language that comes out.”
It feels like a testament to Gallagher that, despite the length of time it takes to get an art exhibition from concept to reality — and despite the time it’s taken to gain a national reputation and cement a hometown show — these inspirations have remained topical.
“It’s just been like a year of emails and JPEGs and different PDFs,” says Gallagher, describing the path to OH BABY’s opening as they begin the show’s installation in the AGNS. “Bringing it all together physically into the space, it feels really exciting.”
The winding road home and the untangling of OH BABY’s ideas feel like an equal unfurling. The show is “this messy carrier bag of various emotional tones and narratives and a few different stories,” Gallager says. “I am trying to map them all out and see how they connect — and hopefully the audience will as well.”
OH BABY is on now at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (1723 Hollis St.) in Halifax.