Phantasmania examines a distinct undercurrent in today’s artistic consciousness that is a response to today’s pervasive climate of war, globalization, and rise of mediated information and experience. Displaying a proclivity toward escapism and a return to materiality (both of which share conceptual and aesthetic strategies rooted in Romanticism, Dada, and Surrealism), the exhibiting artists revert to interior worlds by creating narrative works influenced by fairy tales, dreams, mythologies, and personal and collective memories. Within these alternative realities, the artists meld representational imagery with elements of fantasy and the bizarre, thus creating a place to refer to and understand a world dominated by fear, strangeness, disaster, and social unrest. The exhibition, organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, features painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation by 17 young, emerging artists. A full-color catalogue with an essay by exhibition curator Elizabeth Dunbar accompanies the exhibition.

Above, left: Angela Fraleigh, all consequence as soon forgotten, 2005; Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum Purchase made possible by a gift from Dr. Michael Bastasch in honor of Kathleen A. and Paul M. Bastasch and Elizabeth Dunbar