THE ROOM NEXT DOOR

Opportunity Summary

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR is an international juried photography call from Decagon Gallery.

Juror: Susan Bright

We seek photographs that live in nearness: a lit window across the courtyard, a bedroom no one sleeps in anymore, a voice through the wall. Images that suggest more than they show: mysterious, never obscure, and always offering the viewer a way in. Documentary, staged, conceptual, color or black and white, all welcome.

Selected work will be exhibited online at Decagon Gallery, January 10 – March 10, 2027.

General Information

A Decagon Gallery Spotlight open call

You can hear it before you see it. A voice rising and falling through the wall. A door closing somewhere you can't place. Light under a threshold, a shadow crossing it.

The room next door is the one we almost know. It sits beside our own lives, shares our walls, and holds its secrets just out of sight. It's the neighbor's lit window across the courtyard. It's the bedroom down the hall that no one sleeps in anymore. It's the hotel room whose occupant you will never meet, or the room you grew up in, now someone else's.

For this call, we're looking for photographs that sit in that space between knowing and not knowing: images that suggest more than they show, and invite the viewer to imagine what is on the other side.

What We're Looking For

Work that is mysterious but not impenetrable. Photographs where something is withheld, but a way in is offered. Think of the pull of a half-open door, of an overheard conversation, of a place that feels charged even when it's empty.

Interpret the theme as broadly or as literally as you like. Some possibilities:

• Interiors, thresholds, doorways, windows, and walls
• Neighbors, strangers, and the lives we glimpse but never enter
• Absence and presence: rooms after someone has gone, rooms waiting for someone to arrive
• Memory, family, and the rooms of the past
• Intimacy, privacy, and secrecy
• Psychological and imagined spaces
• Staged, constructed, or surreal work that builds its own adjacent worlds

Documentary, fine art, conceptual, and experimental approaches are all welcome. So are color and black and white, film and digital, and any process you choose.

About the Juror

Dr. Susan Bright (Aus/UK) is a curator, art historian, writer and lecturer with over two decades of experience curating exhibitions featuring both major international and emerging contemporary artists. While maintaining a broad curatorial practice, she specializes in lens-based art and has developed a reputation for strong scholarship combined with imaginative, intuitive and rigorous collaboration.

Awards and Exhibition