A Way of Calling

A Way of Calling, highlights six contemporary art practices that evoke, activate or engage mysterious forces, energies or sensations. The artists featured in this exhibitionrespond to the whisper of the mysterious and the unknown. New Zealand artist Ann Shelton's work, in a forest, captured photographs of the sites where, ‘Hitler’s Oaks,’ grew displaying disparity between their innate beauty and their irreconcilable status as a link to the horrors of the Nazi holocaust. The work harbors unsettling histories, memories, anxieties and trauma. There are three new film works by Canadian collaborators Sheila and Nicholas Pye about two protagonists locked in an evershifting interplay of desire, co-dependency, obsession, anger, repulsion, seduction and vulnerability. In a shift of media, a series of soulful new paintings by Melbourne artist Colleen Ahern explores altered states of consciousness.

Curated by Melissa Keys the exhibition includes a variety of media including a photographic installation examining the relationship between photography and death, spiritual traditions and the feminine, by German Australian artist Susan Fereday. There is an installation from New Zealand artist Dane Mitchell that dwells on the mysteries of sleep and its relationship with consciousness and rationality and also a new work by Dutch artist Jason Hendrik Hansma, where the artist engages a distinguished astronomer and physicist to explore the possibilities for altering the earths orientation to the sun in an effort to bring humankind into a type of utopian expansive sublime.