Séamus Gallagher, THINKING OF YOU THINKING OF ME, 2019. Digital video. Courtesy of the artist.
I feast my eyes on the luscious setting of Séamus Gallagher’s THINKING OF YOU THINKING OF ME, 2019. I am treated to lingering glamour shots of huge, brightly-coloured flowers foregrounding a mysterious stage. The scene is lit with a dramatic single spotlight, lending it some beguiling, old Hollywood allure. The lower portion of a red, sequined gown glitters from behind the closed curtain.
Onscreen, a startling three-headed beauty dramatically parts the curtain and sashays onstage.
Sara Tonin is a multitude of existences at once. She cuts a ravishing figure of indeterminate age. She is a collection of shining atoms that sparkle in and out of knowability like an interdimensional disco ball. If asked politely (manners are very important to Sara), she will point out that her gender is like a Tardis in that it exists outside of time and space and, no surprises here, “it’s bigger on the inside, honey.” She winks when she says this, a hint of Mae West, her pink-eyeshadowed right eye rolling dramatically closed, like a ceramic doll’s. When she says this, the closed eyes of her other heads twitch sympathetically.
Fair warning: Sara does not suffer fools; if you get under her skin, there is a good chance that she’ll oust you from her sight. She’s utterly intractable. Perceived? OK. Quantified? Absolutely not. Fellow travelers, please don’t imagine her value is based on the mere earthly sum of her mundane meat parts. She’s unfathomable—respect her and tip handsomely, please.
Like the unremarkable, common dragonfly, Sara sees colours in ten times as many channels as most of us can. Once, when I foolishly used the word “alien” to describe her, she firmly corrected me. She pointed out that much like her spindly-legged, shiny-winged, swamp-dwelling compatriots, she existed millennia before “all of this mess happened” and will likely abide many millennia after “all of this crap has simply melted back into the ocean, darling.” Her graceful arms gesture expansively as she says this. Time doesn’t mean a lot to Sara.
Today, she sardonically snaps her sharpened, Revlon-red claws like a deadly pistol shrimp. She has my full attention. She directs my gaze down to her impressive, Jessica Rabbit-like curves. She reminds me of something alluring and smoky, violet with a hint of ambergris; I can’t quite place it. I notice her smooth skin, the soft hair that shadows her armpits, her delicate collar bones, her single tattoo, visible but tasteful. I take in the exquisite bluish undergrowth of her five o’clock shadow. I observe the subtle, scintillating outline of her laryngeal prominence as she turns toward me. I feel a creeping, spell-like euphoria.
She tells me that some creatures naturally adorn themselves to look like the hunters who desire them, hiding safely in plain sight. “Moths can look like wasps,” she hisses. “Bees can look like spiders…” She looks down at me with a carnivorous glint in her eyes, “...but spiders dangling from their webs have no agenda outside of feasting upon the fresh blood they require.” She then notes the difference between these eight-legged hunters and the two-legged ones who control for the sake of controlling and crush for the sake of crushing. She sees this latter kind of devouring as a violent and deliberate offense designed to prop up the status quo. She sees language as a valuable tool, a source of liberation, even, but also, in the wrong hands, a weapon designed to control, crush, and incite further controlling and crushing. She notes my simultaneous delight and discomfiture, and quickly shifts gears.
She asks, “What’s more desirable than someone who can demonstrate how much she is wanted?” If you’ve met her, you’ll know that her appearance provides an object lesson for this statement. Sara has three heads. The central head, which I’m guessing controls her body, is giving full glamface, her overdrawn red lips frozen in a plump pout. On either side of her winged eyes, high cheekbones, and prominent jaw, bumpy protuberances convincingly mimic the appearance of a pair of beheaded balding gentlemen, each attached to her by the lips. The sight of them involuntarily brings to mind a vision of a bigamist praying mantis, ghoulishly displaying her postcoital trophies, their severed heads forever frozen in an expression of closed-eyed adoration. I start to feel a buzzing behind my eyes.
As though reading my mind, she strokes the empty air around her head, preening invisible mandibles. She points to her hard-won prizes, sitting stiffly above her sparkling sweetheart neckline. I infer from this that she means to illustrate the dear cost (and rich reward) of joining with her. Overwhelmed, I cast my gaze downwards. She notices this and says, “You’d better watch where and how you’re looking, buddy guy, my heads are up here.” I blush and look away.
I draw my focus to the stage’s curtains. They’re not the rich, heavy velvet of my first impression. They’re made of thin, printed vinyl hung on plastic shower curtain rings. As I approach them, I see that there are gaps between the curtains, but somehow, hard as I try, I’m not able to perceive anything beyond. How strange! Sara explains dispassionately that this space has many similar properties to the Red Room in Twin Peaks. She speaks in a flat, faraway tone. “Beyond the spotlight is an interdimensional portal containing the ineffable allness of everything.” “The flowers, spotlight and curtains are a vehicle, not a destination.” Far-fetched, but I believe Sara; her credibility is potent and unquestionable. I conclude there must be something beyond the curtain; I simply don’t have the rods and cones to see it.
Sara leans in, wraps one arm reassuringly around my shoulder, and indicates the void with a right-handed flourish—a swarm of white-hot sparks streams from her manicured fingertips. I’m transfixed. Looking into the void now with her assistance is like gazing upon endless, redacted documents. I feel myself being drawn closer. I strain my eyes in the inky darkness, reaching for clues. I begin to intuitively recognize emergent patterns in the swirling chasm. I do my best to form words to reflect what I’m seeing but quickly bend to the paradox of describing ALL.
Sara tightens her warm grip and explains reassuringly that just because I can’t put my longing to language doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t follow my instincts and dive right in. She expounds on her early experiences with the portal. “Before I found this glorious form, I experimented a lot. For example, I started off by living three millennia as a sea sponge.” Noting my shocked expression, she adds, “Don’t knock it until you try it, sweetheart; there’s a lot to be said for the simple life. The key isn’t where you start, it’s starting somewhere.”
“You could begin by being a primordial Adam Driver-type and then slowly build your skills until you’re giving a lot of strong cybernetic Keanu energy,” she suggests helpfully. I nod. “How about a semi-aquatic Doja Cat with actual cat ears?” My pupils expand as I blink slowly, utterly mesmerized. “Or, even better, a be-tentacled, glowing, eight-limbed Dr. Who type,” she suggests, sighing audibly. “Sky’s the limit, really! As you gain comfort with the portal, you can really start to get loose and after a while you sort of just become something else...your own thing, understand?” I don’t yet, but I realize I’m starting to as I gratefully and rapturously gaze into the portal and see the shimmering outline of my own expanding reflection next to Sara’s dazzling form. She says: “You see, it’s already starting to happen,” as we step inside together.
Séamus Gallagher is a lens-based media artist based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia). They use self-portraiture and performing for the camera to address gender performances within a digital/online context. Their work is heavily influenced by pop music, video game aesthetics, and writers like José Esteban Muñoz, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Mark Fisher. Gallagher is the recipient of the 2022 Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award, the 2019 BMO 1st Art! Award, and the 2017 AIMIA | AGO Photography Scholarship. They have exhibited at the Locarno Film Festival, the Museum of Fine Art of Leipzig, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto.
Ruth Marsh (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist working in immersive and digital world-building, installation, and drawing-based practices. They are a non-binary settler based on unceded Mi'kmaq territory in Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (also known as Halifax, Nova Scotia).They are interested in playfully queering the intersections between DIY culture and science fact/fiction/fabulation to ponder positive mutations and imagine with bodies and environments. Marsh’s work has been shown in galleries, museums, and festivals within Canada and internationally, including the Confederation Centre of the Arts (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island); Discovery Centre (Halifax, Nova Scotia), The New Gallery (Calgary, Alberta); Trieste Science+Fiction Festival (Trieste, Italy); Labocine: The Science New Wave and InScience International Film Festival (Nijmegen, Netherlands).