Maggie Dunlap and Allan Gardner: Fantasy Lands

Collective Ending, 12 November - 4 December 2022

If Death is in town he shouldn’t miss the two-person show Fantasy Lands, on display at Collective Ending, Deptford until December 4. The exhibition gathers together a morbid set of paintings and sculptures by Maggie Dunlap and Allan Gardner, plotted like a horror film that unfolds around the audience as they move through the gallery.

The horror comes quickly. The humour creeps in a little later. Take Maggie Dunlap’s sculpture by the entrance, Straw Dog. Comprising a central steel bar penetrated by two perpendicular sets of four steel spikes, the whole thing rests on the lower ends of the spikes, the bar elevated to about a foot off the ground. It’s horrible and makes you flinch, like a Richard Serra gone trick-or-treating, but once it has delivered its shock there is little left to consider and it’s time to move on.

On the wall nearby is a trough of blood. Real blood, apparently. The serenity of the dark pool deflates the bombast introduced by Straw Dog, produces a grim fascination and ripples when you blow on it. It would be effective at a larger scale, more along the lines of Richard Wilson’s famous room full of oil. As it stands, it’s a small volume. You could drain more from the neighbour’s cat without it having to die. As a result, Slaughterhouse Trough has to settle for an uncertain point somewhere between horror and comic bathos, neither one nor the other.

Towards the back of the gallery is Dunlap’s Reaper 1, a scythe that rotates above the floor, threatening the ankles of its audience, though if it struck the danger would be to the flimsy sculpture, tragically squeaking its slow way round in a circle. This sculpture achieves what the other two don’t, taking the conventional figure of Death and recasting him as the kind of person who might fit an ergonomic handle to his scythe, or put it on autopilot while he takes a break. Even Death’s varied and demanding career must drag from time to time, and Reaper 1 suggests that, like any worker, sometimes he’d rather put his tools away and spend the day in bed.

Maggie Dunlap, Reaper 1, 2022

Allan Gardner’s paintings prowl an ambiguous route between the everyday and grim death, made more ominous by their monochrome palette. Norm_n_glenda shows a naked woman lying impassively on her back, a bottle by her side, and a dressed man looming over her with seemingly evil intentions, amplified by the leg bones dangling in the foreground. But in Glenda, the same woman appears calm and composed as a model in a life drawing class who happens to be lying next to the anatomical skeleton. 

Are the dark overtones of the paintings a red herring, or is something more sinister at play? Once you’ve spotted the skeletal hands clutching breasts and genitals in two of the smaller ones, the question dissolves into the boundless realm of sexual fantasy, where Death throws off his cloak and joins the living in ecstatic union: not a bad plot twist for a show that oscillates between fear and farce, employing narrative techniques from the genre of horror in the knowledge that a willing audience will be in for a fun ride.