(a contemporary) phantasmagoria (2) – Artist Talk and Private View

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This artist talk and private view relates to the exhibition, (a contemporary) phantasmagoria (2), taking place in the Cornerstone Gallery during the period of the Angel Field Festival 2025. The talk at 4.30pm will take place in the Grace Room (COR 114) at Liverpool Hope University Creative Campus, Cornerstone Building, 17 Shaw Street, Liverpool L6 1HP and be followed by a Private View in the Cornerstone Gallery (same location) at 5.45pm. 

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Artists: Alison Aye, John Bunker, EC, Matthew Collings, Karen David, Matt Dennis, Paul Dewis, Deborah Gardner, Carrie Granger, Matt Hale, Emma Lilly, Jane Millar, Simon Pike, Joni Spigler, Michael Stubbs, Ken Turner.

curated by John Bunker and Ken Turner

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Building on (a contemporary) phantasmagoria’s successful run at Tension Fine Art in London, (a contemporary) phantasmagoria (2) will extend its range and ambition for the prestigious Cornerstone Gallery at Liverpool Hope University's renowned Creative Campus.

We might understand the word ‘Phantasmagoria’ as conjuring up the magic-lantern shows of darkened eighteenth-century drawing rooms; or, in its more recent incarnation, as Walter Benjamin’s term for the fractured, kaleidoscopic nature of the experience of modernity. This show looks to enlarge the scope of Benjamin’s definition, the better to take the measure of our fragmentary, collagic, screen-mediated contemporary reality.

The selected artists invest painting and sculpture with a startling and raucous materiality, twinned with meticulous craftsmanship. Collage and abstraction are used to open-up or pulverise both picture plane and sculptural object, rendering them as sites of complex disruptions, antagonisms and mutations. (a contemporary) ‘phantasmagoria (2) reflects ironically on the sense of loss, frailty and failure by which our era, the ‘High Anthropocene’, might one day come to be defined; but it also seeks to show how current artistic practice channels the multifarious, ineffable ways in which a contemporary phantasmagoria can act upon us, thereby becoming a catalyst for change.