JO Lansley and Helen Bendon have already caused a stir in York this year with their photographs in the Petty Crimes exhibition at the City Art Gallery.

They said their pictures of adults in mis-worn children's clothing "hijacked codes of behaviour and dress and usurped traditional female domestic roles". Others thought they looked outwardly like an adult twist on kiddie porn, and while the "child abuse" assessment in the comments book was not specifically addressed in the direction of the Lansley and Bendon, you can bet they were the subject of the woman visitor's ire.

Now there is more, much more of the duo's disarming work to be seen and dissected at Impressions, and rather than "child abuse", I prefer to interpret their subversive videos and photographs as a feminist raid on childhood and its games, its secretive, exclusive friendships and hidden bonds.

The Guardian's northern edition of The Guide has selected this "nasty-girl double act" as the number one exhibition of the moment, and while it would say that, wouldn't it, the paper is not merely being trendy for trendy's sake.

Lansley and Bendon are controversial, confrontational artists, a pair of Manchester mischief makers who are as wrapped up in their own world - and their mutual dress code - as fellow shock tacticians Gilbert and George but still succeed in shaking up the status quo as art and video has the power to do.

Yet just as the sinister Gilbert and George come to mind, so do Cinderella's conspiratorial Ugly Sisters and those naughty Yorkshire children who fooled Arthur Conan Doyle and the science cognoscenti in 1917 with their faked photos of the frolicking Cottingley fairies. Indeed, Lansley and Bendon can be seen as the adult version of those Edwardian girls, playing psychological war games, in complicit silence, that confront the underlying desires and anxieties of adults, and in particular, of men.

As for the Ugly Sisters' comparison, Lansley and Bendon are similarly scary and humorous all at once. Never more so than in the centrepiece of this Turnpike Gallery touring exhibition: the "murder and knitting video" narrative Little Pleasures, in which the terrible twins seduce and abduct a man on a bus, take him home, knit him with immaculate attention to detail into a woollen body sock and then drown him. Another case of the needle and the damage done, to coin a Neil Young phrase.

Lansley and Bendon occupy not only an alternative fairytale world, where feminist revenge has its day, but also the land of nod, of dreams and nightmares. The abiding image is of a ring of magic mushrooms on grubby Tarmac: a metaphor for their mind games.