Carolina Antich, Steven Gontarski, littlewhitehead, Shana Moulton, Hirsch Perlman, Sista Pratesi, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Jenny Watson

"I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if Im not the same, the next question is Who in the world am I? Ah, thats the great puzzle!"
Alice - Lewis Carroll, Alices Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

Bringing together the work of eight international contemporary artists, "Alternative States" explores otherworldly, illusory conditions, transformations and marginal spaces. Challenging conventions and hierarchical structures, the works of art included in this exhibition offer symbolic inversions of, parallels to, and remedies for, the normal and real world. Imagining and then revealing other standpoints and subject positions, these artists provide portals to alternative states of being.

Childhood imagination and possibility are the focus of Carolina Antichs paintings. Utilising a soft colour pallet, her works explore the magic and mystery of childhood, whilst also containing sinister undertones. Antichs pre-pubescent children at play take on eerie attributes in their distance, and even removal, from the modern world.

In his drawings of young men and quasi-religious motifs, Steven Gontarski constructs his own mythologies steeped in fantasy and memory. To the minds eye a dreamed event may have equal value to an actual event because they have both been experienced, and then tucked away as memories.

littlewhitehead play in the grey zone between reality and unreality. Presenting sculptural installations that combine realism and theatricality, they examine the relationship between the realisation of a fiction and the fictionalisation of the real. Much is left unsaid and we are encouraged to construct our own stories and narratives as a means of negotiating their often- macabre subject matter.

Shana Moultons video works examine the possibility of physical and spiritual healing through the use of alternative remedies, dance and mystical therapies. Combining wry humour with a low-tech, pop sensibility, in the video series "Whispering Pines" we see Cynthia, a hypochondriac, move from her humdrum everyday life into happier, dreamlike worlds.

Hirsch Perlmans black and white photographs of crude, robot-like figures constructed from cardboard and enclosed in empty bedrooms are individually labelled with a day and time. The recording of these specific times suggests an ambition towards scientific observational research. References to both Pygmalion and Frankenstein are evident: the creation of mythic friends who provide a release from the world outside.

Believing that our cultural climate coerces us into seeing things in certain ways, Sista Pratesis paintings challenge visual conventions and depict a moment of metamorphosis. The graphic stillness of Pratesis vistas is counterpoised by the energising geometric spiralling vortex. Her paintings reveal gateways into hidden worlds, liminal spaces between the past and the future, the here and the unexplained.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook is concerned with how the world is perceived and what happens when norms are challenged. What is known becomes unknown; time is compressed and social structures upturned in the work Nine day pregnancy of a single middle aged associate professor. What is fixed becomes dislodged, tentative and uncertain.

Taking her Australian suburban childhood as a main point of departure, Jenny Watsons paintings are uncompromising examinations of human nature. Juxtaposing family dramas and overheard comments with childhood daydreams, Watson examines how mechanisms for coping with reality may be found in imaginative spaces.