Let There Be A Thousand Blossoms Bloom

Brigid Hansen on Halbes Halbes by Seamus Platt & Georg Whelan

In the local pub at Rainbow Beach sits a white-framed, sun-stained image of an upended ‘96 Pajero awash on the shore, half-swallowed in the surf. It’s a foreboding and amusing trophy of Man Versus Tide, local and blow-in, amusement and stupidity.

Australia is a place full of contradictions. ‘Free’ but fucked if you don’t have a car. We’re the Lucky Country but it’s our right to eviscerate the land. Can’t swim there coz you’ll get stung, can’t want too much, can’t forget the farmers. The concept of a Working Holiday.

In Halbes Halbes, Georg Whelan & Seamus Platt explore some of these tensions and contradictions.

A keen perceiver, Platt’s work delicately weaves threads between two disparate 35mm documentary projects to provoke quiet contemplation. Challenging the canonical understanding of photographic image as objective document, these works are imbued with feeling, hope, humour, understanding.

In the spirit and tradition of the everyday, Platt chooses to display their ‘non-frame’ series of photographs as inkjet prints within a homemade papier-mache device in an intentional bid to accept, rather than fight, the inevitable degradation of the fine art object. These ashtray-esque hand-painted vessels have an endearing, playful sense of containment, holding warmly within them a number of spontaneous displays of ordinary performance; a shirtless man re-felting his pool table in a suburban Brisbane shed, a silver gum full of sneakers hanging like christmas ornaments, a skater and a drag performer flipping off the camera.

Whelan’s works sit within a more expressionist tradition, bricolage scenes and combinations of real and imagined figures and fragments. A cross-handed clergyman in a fluorescent stole casts a poised, stern look - in front of a rearranged church sign reading ‘eat shit and die’ - under an oil-slick sky lit by both moon and saccharine-smile sun. A pastoral pencil sketch of a sitting lamb is inserted into an evocative, gothic charcoal portrait of Port Arthur Shooter Martin Bryant. Sculpted knuckle-dusters with a pearl chain attached sit in an assemblage of oil on aluminium portrait works - a meditation on the tyranny of heroism in the Australian psyche.

In prioritising personal experience and drawing attention to the mechanics of meaning-making as materiality, framing and display, Whelan and Platt put forth a body of work embracing the contradictory; all at once reflective, critical, celebratory and speculative.

Brigid Hansen

April 2024, Berlin

Blockbuster

Joy Qin on Seamus Platt's Big Country Town

Seamus and I moved from Brisbane to Berlin at around the same time, at around the same age. Many mutual friends but until recently, we were strangers. I hail from a Law and History background thus my creative practice naturally gravitated toward writing, while Seamus’ Fine Arts background led them to exactly that, namely through the mediums of photography and sculpture. As contrasting as our disciplines may seem, I think we both struggle toward trying to articulate some implicit cultural truth. 

The idea of Australia, Queensland, and Brisbane being a cultural wasteland, or at least a vacuum, is not a new one. Indeed, the term “cultural cringe” was coined by A.A. Phillips in the eponymous essay published by the Australian literary magazine Meanjin in 1950. (1) Meanjin is the name for this area given by the Turrubul people, one of the indigenous custodians of the land upon which Brisbane sits.

Big Country Town. Big-Country-Town. Bigcountrytown. 

Is another name given. Who knows when it started, but locals affectionately (?) know our home to be just this. To be self-effacing is one of the more acceptable ways Australians can digest reality. Yet within the rigid mugginess of what’s unsaid exists many unspoken examples of the Other in our Big Country Town. Within lack there often blooms natural contradiction. 

Orbiting around this tacit hyper-normativity is the challenge of what’s Big about this country town. In a place where Status Quo is King, a default masculinity fills in the gaps like thick, messy cement. Blocked up, pushed down – boggy, we leave it to fester. Make of it what you will (but you’d better not get it wrong). Big Swingin’ unbandaged open wound, come and see the costumes we’ve made to dress it, trying it on for size. How queer, how cool, how wonderful. 

Like the dimensions of a photostrip, we see content squeezed into a margin. While gender is not a binary, through the very act of forcing one to exist, the shades of grey ooze out. Sidenoted pleasure, empathy, softness, introspection – phobia, toxicity, brutishness, drudgery. These are Big Blockbuster diptychs that show a world beyond lack – striking at not just vivid dichotomy, but togetherness through disparity and importantly through memory. 

What rings truest in my friendship with Seamus, and our bond with our big country town, is humour. In discussing this Exhibition, we Seamus and I crossed weighty topics of family, neurodivergence, queerness, masculinity, art and identity, but what was really the most piercing thing they said to me about the collection was simply: “The skatin’ scene in Bris, they can be real annoying ‘bout ‘graf…” Boyish cheek, running amock, wild laughter bouncing and echoing, as we tickle the boundaries of bizarre. It’s the only way to make sense of these insistent yet non-existent binaries in our somewhat shared upbringing. Maybe we’re just a product of the choking larrikinism of our town, but lightness against dark seems to be what matters most, just like the constant and often harsh sunlight that blinds our sunshine state. For us both, perhaps truth lies within the joke. You had to be there.

 (1) A.A. Phillips, ‘The Cultural Cringe’, Meanjin, vol. 9, no. 4, Summer 1950, pp. 299–302.