Shaka McGlotten’s book, Virtual Intimacies, describes how mediated spaces of connection like hookup apps and multiplayer video games are not only “virtual” in existing in digital space, but also in terms of being seen as inferior and lacking compared to the supposed authenticity of experience available in “the real world.” McGlotten generatively shifts the conversation by suggesting that much of what we consider intimacy is itself “virtual,” never totally fulfilled and existing in potentiality and fantasy rather than something concretely tangible in the world.

What Séamus Gallagher calls A Slippery Place animates this unstable terrain of the virtual. Drawing on drag, Gallagher created 3D models of outfits and environments in a program called Pepakura that were printed on paper, sculpted and hot-glued into shape. With Gallagher as model, the rigid yet fragile paper costumes appear constricting and demobilizing. While the digital promises speed and fluidity, the transformation of code into crude DIY physicality deflates these techno-aspirations. Instead, like a glitch, the figure appears “stuck” in the ground. This avatar, while open to gendered and other kinds of self-fashioning, is doomed to pose this way forever. The artist’s body seems caught partway through a mutation from carbon-based flesh to silicon-based fabrication, with the printed paper masks they wear frozen in uncanny grimaces. And yet, I’m seduced by this world’s dazzling colour palette…

I think of the globalized RuPaul’s Drag Race industrial complex and how young queens now grow up with a “virtualized” knowledge of drag gleaned largely from social media and the TV show itself, a dolled-up Ouroboros. Performing to the camera — for Instagram, for the fans watching in HD — crafts a desirable image and brand. But Gallagher’s cut-and-paste fantasia, precisely in its stiffness and “failure,” seems to offer the possibility of new aesthetic pleasures and embodiments in being an image.

* PHOTO OF SEAMUS GALLAGHER: Katie Nakaska