Newsletter #29 / Seamus Platt x /squared
'Portal to Yourself'
Happy New Year
With the turn of the axis, we are very excited to announce our next /squared artist, Seamus Platt, and their show, Portal to Yourself.
Seamus Platt is a Brisbane-based visual artist who employs the photographic image as a starting point to interrogate the distance between documentary and narrative genres. Intentionally oscillating between photography’s poles of 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 expressed through the “every day,” Platt suggests subtle and evocative storylines.
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.
Portal to Yourself will be available for viewing from Thursday, January 11th. This will be Platt’s last Australian show before exp(l)at(t)riating to Berlin.
Join us for celebratory drinks at 6pm, January 12th, at 75 Vulture St, West End.
As is customary, this newsletter serves as a pre-viewing opportunity to become acquainted with Platt’s practice, through a scrapbook curation of their choosing. Find below a selection of writings, playlists, and documentation from both Platt and their wider net of research; keep them in the back of your mind as you mosey past 75 Vulture St in the heat of the second act of summer.
Bon voyage, Seamus! Meanjin will miss your documentation.
Dispatches from Platt / Practice Journal
From me to you: songs on rotation while I made work this year
I’m into pairing disparate imagery in order to instigate feeling, emotion or story time. My work focuses on the idea of the ‘narrative leap’, the subconscious moment in which a viewer forms and connects the invisible dots between image pairs or sets.
To me, in a lot of ways this in-between space is more important than the actual images as this zone of ambiguity offers an invitation to learn about ourselves and our visual literacy. I’m really interested in the intertwinement of identity and the ways in which we read imagery, two things completely unique to each individual, that are in constant flux, formulating and morphing from the moment we’re born.
Depending on the length of the set and the closeness of the subject matter in my pairings, I’ll either try to incite a more specific or ambiguous sense to the work.
I like to be fun, silly and a little bit facetious with my work.
I find great joy and inspiration in:
moving my body
the instagram carousel / photo book lite / iPhone photos in 6x6
iGET BAR
Carmen Winant, Looking Forward to Being Attacked (2018)
Max Pinckers, Margins of Excess (2018)
Thomas Jeppe, Abstract Journalism (2014)
From me to you: iPhone induced psychosis photoset [21 of 20]
Join us for celebratory drinks at 6pm, January 12th, at 75 Vulture St, West End.
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What FORA wants
The FORA newsletter seeks to bring forward the intertextuality that we reside in, and the inextricable ways in which art and life are linked. That is an obvious point, but one that must be constantly remarked upon, as it is one we are constantly surprised by. To be reminded of these circles is to be drawn back into the fold, equipped with the tools of thinking critically and acting compassionately.
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pps/FORA is developed on the unceded land of the Jagera and Turrbal peoples