Mother Memory Cellophane
Imagined as a phantasmic theatre, Mother Memory Cellophane is inspired from an event that took place in 1939, at the New York World’s Fair, whose theme was “World of Tomorrow.” On this occasion, the company DuPont presented Miss Chemistry, a model meant to personify Chemistry and serve as a living advertisement for the world premiere of their nylon stockings. The following year, a survey found Mother, Memory and Cellophane to be the most beautiful words in the English language.
Séamus Gallagher appropriates these words for their own use to create a mashup of stereotypical femininity and synthetic material culture in a drag reincarnation of Miss Chemistry—or more specifically, her ghost. By reviving yesterday’s “world of tomorrow” in a mirage of projections and lenticular printing, the artist explores our contemporary sense of a future in ruins. In this way, Gallagher invites us to embrace and perhaps even slip into history’s unfulfilled prophecies, like a nylon stocking.
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McCord Stewart museum
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