China Heights presents 'Lend Me Your Slow Hands', Hugh Van Schaick’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

This series of new paintings expands on Van Schaick’s continued interest in vulnerability and connection, and the discomfort surrounding these ideas. Closely cropped figurative forms, in varying degrees of ambiguity, invite active observing, forcing the viewer to question what they are witnessing. The perspective of the compositions is manipulated, turned sideways or upside down, to disrupt the viewing experience and further abstract the forms.

The bodies are presented in states of bareness, up close to the frame, asking for care. Areas of vulnerability, such as the ribs, back or collarbone, are left exposed in a display of trust and intimacy. But there is a tension here too, at once tender and tight, wary of the inherent violence and risk of sharing one’s fragility and flaws, whether to a loved one, friends or wider society. Van Schaick’s colour choices further encapsulate this friction – especially with the prevalence of yellow, which has a history of carrying both life and anxiety.

A range of oils and mediums were used to create a varied surface, with areas of gloss and matte, that shift and change as the viewer moves around the works. This creates an object that is active, not static. In this way, referencing the technique of Figure-Ground Reversal, backgrounds and shadows are often pulled forward, shifting the focus from the body to the negative space. What is behind comes forward: what is unseen becomes seen.

Pentimenti - the traces of previous sketches, markings and compositions - are embraced, and the sides of the canvases purposefully display their history. Built up in thin layers over months, these are slow works inhabiting life in the studio, of process; which reject the modern speed of image creation and intake, instead asking you to settle in and take your time with them.

Orbits is a group exhibition featuring Emmeline Joy Morris, Dan Mitchell, Daniel Octoriver and Mim Libro. The show takes cues from Frank Frazetta, HR Giger, and the counter culture surrealism of Alexandro Jodorowsky. Dan Mitchell's paintings establish the backdrop. Mim Libro's airbrushed characters supply the cast. Emmeline Joy Morris's ceramic armour provides protection. Daniel Octoriver's graphic compositions offer a kind of map for navigating the exhibition and its imagined territories.

Emmeline Joy Morris works primarily in ceramics, extending into video, fashion and sound. Based in Sydney, with previous residencies in Germany and the UK, her anthropomorphic forms sit between flesh and object. Drawing on fantasy weaponry and armour, she replicates everyday objects in clay as stand ins for the body. This practice comes from neurodivergent experiences of dissociation and overstimulation. These ceramic pieces are vulnerable but enduring. For Orbits, her work functions as the equipment needed to move through the dream world: armour, protection, extensions of the self.

Dan Mitchell paints overgrown, swampy interiors. Dense vegetation. Thick air. The light in his work builds its own weather, wet and glowing. These are not landscapes as background. They pull you to the water's edge to see what stirs below. Mitchell creates the climate of this seasonal world. His canvases are the ground everything else sits upon.

Daniel Octoriver is a tattooist, artist and Arakan martial art instructor working out of Richmond, Melbourne. His paintings mix manga illustration, spiky typography and biomechanical tattoo compositions. He charts relationships between line and flesh, image and sensation. His works act as maps or game plans. They give you the visual language to find your way through the exhibition.

Mim Libro uses airbrush to make hyper comic witch characters. They are always up to something. Her work starts at home: mice in the walls, sleepless nights, catching something frightened by hand. From there she moves to bigger concerns. Fragility. Gentleness. Guilt. The imbalance between power and survival. Knives find backs. Skulls carry sadness. The yin yang gets clutched. Her figures are wounded but still reaching. They are the cast of Orbits, moving through Mitchell's swamps, protected Morris's talismans, following Octoriver's parchment.

China Heights Gallery presents ERUPTIONS, a survey of recent paintings by Sydney based artist Alex Xerri. The show is offsite at Louis Vuitton Brisbane and brings together twenty two works made over the last four years.

Xerri’s paintings pull from an unusual set of sources. Apex predators, but photographed on clunky early 2000s silver digicams. Fiery sedans. Old video game graphics, the scratchy polygonal kind. Then there are erupting volcanoes, flowing lava, desert nights, and beige computers on fire. She funnels all of this into the studio and builds landscapes from it. The surfaces are rough, acrylic and crushed stone on canvas.

Her references include nature documentaries, car design, and early 3D gaming. She calls the results speculative biomes, places that don’t exist but feel like they could.

A recurring thread in her work is the period around the year 2000. Xerri describes that time as a mix of hangover from the past and excitement for the future. New technology appeared and became obsolete quickly. Her paintings hold onto that tension without nostalgia or irony. They treat outdated objects, silver digicams, blocky game worlds, beige computers, as material worth looking at seriously.

This is Xerri’s first Brisbane exhibition. She has shown solo in Sydney and Nottingham, and in group shows across Australia, the United States, and Europe. Her work is held in private collections internationally.

ERUPTIONS opens 22 April 2026 and runs for three months at Louis Vuitton Brisbane, presented offsite by China Heights Gallery.