This exhibition wants to spirit you away

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Carolina Wheat wanted to explore the world of “unknown forces, chance encounters, happenstance, and serendipity” in her new exhibition. Things that “strike when one is open to it”, says the American curator. “Allowing our spirits to be moved is an acceptance of the unknown.”

Wheat set about assembling a group of 18 artists whose work they felt kindled an openness to the spiritual at the contemporary art gallery and curatorial project Elijah Wheat Showroom, which she runs with the artist Liz Nielsen. The resulting exhibition, titled When the Spirit Moves You, opens this month at the Geary Contemporary Gallery in New York’s Hudson Valley, in a newly opened space upstairs.

Wheat has arranged the works in the show into a “deconstructed altar”. Upon entering the installation, visitors discover an area decorated with a printed velvet rug by the Brooklyn-based artist Kat Ryals ($3,000) and votives for candles, with pillows scattered on the floor. Displayed on pedestals around the room are Rachel Owen’s Future Fossils (from $7,000), an assemblage of translucent, otherworldly crystals made from resin and glass, one of which is the cast of a 400-year-old tree, believed to be the oldest living thing discovered in New York. Edie Fake’s kaleidoscopic acrylic and gouache painting “Hurricane Lantern” shimmers on the wall ($8,000). Visitors can light candles, read a spread of tarot cards designed by the collective Hilma’s Ghost or just sit and take in the work.

At the centre of the show is ceramicist Roxanne Jackson’s “Red Velvet Candle Holder” ($18,000), a weird and wonderful 6ft sculpture that also serves as a candlestick holder. It’s formed of a tree trunk, a red buckled shoe, a cake with a slice missing, an amphora, a swan and, at the top, a monstrous green paw grasping a candle. (The artist has said that it’s these “collisions of utility and absurdity, the playful, the ironic and the grotesque” that she finds interesting.)

Elsewhere, Brooklyn-based Adrienne Elise Tarver’s video installation, “Manifest” ($10,000), shows the artist’s hand lighting candles, laying out crystals and shuffling a spread of tarot cards. As the cards are turned, ‘readings’ appear, including footage of oceans, swamp lands and the artists Maya Angelou, Josephine Baker and Nina Simone. Tarver wanted to use the piece to think about what is passed down from one generation of black women to the next.

It will offer “a moment to reflect on lineages, visible and invisible connections,” she says.

The show comes at a moment when the occult and the spiritual are firmly part of the zeitgeist; the works should resonate, Wheat says, with ideas of “positivity, community, shared visions and consciousness”. She also hopes that each visitor will bring something of their own to the show, but also take something from it: “a small spark of energy, of love, or a feeling of discovery.”

When the Spirit Moves You, curated by Elijah Wheat Showroom, is at the Geary Contemporary gallery in Millerton from 19 October to 15 December