Here lies the keys to the next dimension

The Wama art gallery is three hours outside of Melbourne in Grampians/Gariwerd, Victoria.

Arriving at Wama meant stitching together a dawn drive, a flight, and another three hour drive past sheep paddocks and dodging rogue kangaroos.

Over my week art'ing around in the Grampians, I felt the overwhelming push to 'surrender'. There's something in the air up there. Everything, the art, the roos, the mountains, the distance, all had a dramatic physicality. And that physicality dominates so definitively that the only option is to surrender to it. My experience of surrender is best defined by an openness to the universal randomness. I was doing my thing and what ever might happen to me next was going to be okay.

The exhibition flexed this idea through overwhelming sound, dramatic darkness and towering video.

The exhibition is dominated by a synchronised 4-channel video projected onto four walls, arranged in a square. Each wall displayed different footage of the artist Jacobus Capone within the Bossons glacier in France. There were couches arranged in the centre so I sat and starred. Feeling like I'm being consumed by these massive glacial-scapes.

I felt isolation. As I'd imagine the artist would be feeling it too. He and I are alone, surrounded by melting ice, having journeyed very far from home, and fully surrendering control. I saw another man leave the exhibition in tears. 

Outside the gallery, the Grampians mountain range acts as the scenic backdrop to what ever sort of therapy was undertook in the exhibition.

On site there are two outdoor works arranged on what I can only describe as a soccer field of sandy dirt. As if laid by the crop-circle-drawing aliens. One piece, titled Geode Tree, is a 3 metre long section of a 600 year old gum tree, hallowed and filled with geodes, fossils, stones and shells. The other, a ring of green broad beans contrasting with the brown of the dirt, watered through an underground irrigation system called Spring. They may very well hold some sort of keys to another dimension.

The mountains, like the Jacobus's glaciers, held the space for me to reflect about life, art, and nature. They felt like a shield blocking out the real world. A cone of silence. The gates to Jurassic Park.

By the time I left, I knew the trip wasn’t just about art. It was about letting go. About re-instilling my faith in myself and the future, without having a clear path. Jacobus finds that kind of surrender in the ice; I found it in the mountains, in the art, in the long hours of getting there and back. Ten hours in, ten hours out, and something shifted. Not necessarily resolved. But more nudged forward, the way a current takes you when you finally stop fighting it.