Whitehot Recommends: Maggie Dunlap: Gilded Splinters at No Gallery

Installation view, Maggie Dunlap: Gilded Splinters at No Gallery.

By WM February 8, 2024

From the press release: 

In her inaugural New York City solo exhibition at No Gallery titled Gilded Splinters, Maggie Dunlap presents a series of metal, steel, and brass wall mounted sculptures inspired by the agricultural tools and superstitious rituals that define the visual landscapes of both the American South and Southwest of England.  

Born of research into British folkloric traditions, specifically those of Devon and Cornwall, which played integral roles in the folk horror sub-genre boom of the 1970’s. These films would give way to their American equivalent in “hicksploitation.” Defining films of the genre such as Deliverance and The Wicker Man are at their core about regionalism, fear of the other, locations forever entwined with their dark and gruesome histories, places which favor “the old ways” over the new. The ghosts of the past haunting the ways of the present are a central theme in folk horror and Dunlap’s work, like a layline running through motorcycle gangs doing donuts in stone circles (Psychomania), in weird machines and wrong furniture fashioned from human bones by the former slaughterhouse workers made obsolete by technological innovations (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), in an American outsider murdering a violent Cornish villager with an antique bear trap (Straw Dogs). WM