The ancients thought our eyes allowed us to see by casting a gentle fire upon the world. In the eleventh century, Ibn al-Haytham flipped the script, saying light comes from outside and enters the eye. Real heads know it’s both. Look hard enough—step forward or back—and what’s before you becomes fractal: forms and meanings endlessly dissolve, percolate and reappear, filtered through our own projections.
Dean De Landre’s new work captures the energy and ambiguity of this interchange. Viewers are pitched into bewilderingly dense greenery—is that a branch of quivering leaves, or a dragonfly poised for flight?—and then zoomed out to cinematic third-person stills with a sense of the uncanny.
These scenes, alternately painted or recreated with plastic beads, confound what counts as real. The world has always been mutable and porous, impossible to fix in place. In this exhibition, the renditions themselves flicker as if by candlelight; each flutter of one’s eye alighting upon a new impression. Text by Nathan Mifsud