This event will take place on the unceded land of the people of the Yuggera Nation. We would like to pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. We acknowledge that this land was violently invaded, that colonisation continues to this day and that sovereignty was never ceded.
Set in so-called Australia, Suburban Apparitions is a coming-of-age-like quasi-documentary. In their debut solo show, Platt masquerades as painter and sculptor in an attempt to destabilise the authority long associated with the photographic genre.
Drawing upon their personal archive of candid and staged pictures, Platt places unrelated scenes from their day-to-day life, side by side, in order to create new contexts and explore how a photograph can shift its meaning dependent on time, perspective, and positioning.
Peppered with tongue-in-cheek notions of conspiracy theory, Christianity, environmental concern, purpose, and personal life, the work flirts with ways in which we make meaning from images, underlining the inevitable biases tied to the photo maker’s creation and photo viewer’s reception.
DJ Set from:
Mechanorecptor
Essay by:
Alex Baxter
Seamus Platt is a Brisbane-based, visual artist who employs the photographic image as a starting point in order to explore the distance between the documentary and narrative genres. Intentionally oscillating between photography’s poles; index and construction, Platt works to dismantle Photography’s archaic relation to authenticity, foregrounding the medium’s unavoidable bind with bias. Using the power of past tense, Platt leans on semiotic sequencing to create meaning through metaphor, pairing sets of disparate images that are drawn from their archive.
Platt responds to their immediate milieus, examining gender identity and so-called Australia’s socio-political landscape in an era of post-truth. Drawing on these familiarities in a tongue-in-cheek manner and expressed through the “every day,” Platt suggests subtle and evocative storylines in their works, which they consider indicative of a larger social context.
Graduating from the Queensland University of Technology with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts (Visual Art) in 2017, Platt has gone on to exhibit work at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Fitzroy, Outer Space, The Brisbane Powerhouse, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Street Art Festival and The Walls Art Space Gold Coast.
Suburban Apparitions is an inclusive, safe space and therefore encourages the attendance of people from all walks of life, regardless of race, sexuality, gender identity, physical and/or intellectual ability, class, education, or age. There is an absolute ZERO tolerance policy for any form of harassment or attempts to other any individual(s).
Exhibition Opening: 16th September, 6:30-10:00pm
