White Knight @ Collective Gallery

The gallery space has always implicitly challenged the meaning of true communal property. Alex Gross and Anna Mields’ film, Farbenlehre, at The Collective explores this idea explicitly. Shots pan over withered, white houses, Spanish, cobbled courtyards and untended greenery in and around a village created in the 70s, designed on a utopian idea of anti-authoritarian education. The film speaks of the venture’s failure and, in a wider sense, of the failure of a movement. Gross and Mields' aesthetic focus is not one of mourning, however; they obsessively inject colour and shape into this landscape-that-time-forgot. By "putting things in places they shouldn’t be", they question the difference between the ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’.

Before viewing the film, visitors must first walk across the artists' installation of earthy, Spanish cobbles and past a geometric, floating wall of coloured cuboids. Starkly contrasting (and aesthetically awkward) one begins to see both components as equally unnatural: the cobbled earth laid out in patterns, may be more familiar but is nevertheless a construct of city planning.

At first glance, it is difficult to see how Emily Wardill’s Full Firearms relates to Mields and Gross’s work, but she too explores the idea of creating communal space. We voyeuristically watch a conversation the protagonist is having with an architect. Initially within the limits of what we might regard as normal, her plans begin to veer off into ‘LOL’-able irrational ideas and desires: "100 boys will live there", the "stairs should only go up, not down", and a "biosphere is an absolute must".

Reading the accompanying programme, her sci-fi desires take on a darker quality. This is not fantasy; the house is actually for the ghosts of people killed by firearms produced by her father’s company. These irrational dreams are what would be required to build them a heaven or utopia on earth. Both Farbenlehre and Full Firearms seem to say that this dream is still very much out of reach.