Opening at Josh Lilley on August 29, Altar States explores artworks as phenomenological sites, imbued with value through the subjective experiences of the maker. Some artworks attain sacrality through their intrinsic content and concept, while others find significance in their formalism, pattern, shape, and corporeality. Together, they delve into materiality and commemoration, with the artists’ physical presence inscribed in surfaces, brushstrokes, and textures—a transference of memory. Objects transform into portals illuminating human existence in all its richness, compressing time, place, space, and history.

In a period dominated by image-led thinking, abstraction becomes a post-internet, post-truth language—an obscuration at the edge of legibility and conscious vision. As artists navigate the interstices of temporality and spatiality, their energies are sublimated into making, resulting in a nuanced exegesis of spirituality and quasi-spirituality across mediums. The act of creation itself is intrinsic to their practice, occurring through subconscious decision-making or hyperconscious manipulation of energy. This ritualistic approach liberates the artistic psyche, with scale emerging and re-emerging within works, an oscillation between macro and micro imagery and composition. Some pieces assume subversivism and politicisation merely by resisting typical order, presenting a reality that is neither instrumental nor decorative. Using myriad source images and materials in varying ways—whether as subject matter or process—works forge connections with art historical genres, practices, archaeology, and historical legacies.

While visually and materially disparate, the artworks exhibited converge in their embodiment of testimony and articulation of personal and collective history. Referring also to the Southern Hemisphere’s Ara constellation, named “Altar” in Latin, the term conjures connections to what lies beyond our field of vision and understanding — belief, mysticism, and the potential of art to guard myths, rituals, and stories.

Bringing together practitioners whose work evokes memory, divinity, and the unearthliness of relics, artifacts, or fragmented forms, Altar States reflects on concepts of legacy, place, and narrative. It questions which histories we choose to preserve and cherish, what becomes permanent, and what is fleeting. Forms are purposefully abstracted, brought out, disguised, or hinted at, engaging with history and its allowances and omissions. An interplay and interrelation of language, symbolism, and embodiment emerges throughout, a spectrum of transcendence beyond ordinary limitations and interpretation.