Fantasy Lands

Allan Gardner & Maggie Dunlap

12 November — 4 December 2022
Collective Ending HQ, London

Presenting an austere landscape filled with mischief and menace, Fantasy Lands brings together two artists that challenge the relationship between image, perception and the politics of fear in contemporary culture. Featuring a new body of monochromatic paintings by Leeds-based artist and writer Allan Gardner alongside a series of grave and unapologetic steel sculptures by American conceptual artist Maggie Dunlap, Fantasy Lands speaks to the heart of an increasingly mediated and paranoid world. One in which sensations of anticipation, spectacle and dread are all the more indistinguishable. Where feelings of alienation and confusion are enshrined in subversive visual landscapes.

Together the visual language of Fantasy Lands speaks to the uncanny relationship between contemporary media, nostalgia and horror – yet the ideas behind Dunlap & Gardner’s respective work digs deeper under the skin. In turn they pose questions about the relationship between alienation, identity and image-production; between an embrace of ambiguity and withdrawal versus a politics of fear concerned precisely with manufacturing and targeting those same feelings. How and why people respond to and project a sense of threat in their lives – both virtually and IRL – is of increasing relevance not only to the ecology of images that we consume with alarming degrees of personal and social detachment, but the effects this ecology then has on our material lives –who and what we chose to desire, ignore or discriminate against.