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

I head to the supermarket, the CarPlay interface emblazoned with WAVE OF MUTILATION by the Pixies. The title of the song undermines the pleasure of the music with visions of conflict—victims of war strewn across rubble.

The bitumen ahead is subtly imbued with political rhetoric: LEFT LANE ENDS, MERGE RIGHT.

Now in Aisle 6, packets of WIZZ FIZZ spark early childhood memories of swimming under the shadow of Luna Park, sun-soaked and sucking on a plastic spoon filled with sherbet. Over to Aisle 12, cleaning products promise to REMOVE ALL STAINS. How marvellous—all regrets just washed away.

Bike out, I pump my tyres in readiness for riding, their black rubber embossed with DO NOT OVER-INFLATE, an always helpful reminder to keep one’s ego in check.

Riding home, I pass a piece of discarded cardboard, its printed matter reading: BASIC LIFE SUPPORT — air, water, food, work, love.

As I near my destination, a local church sign declares: FREE TRIP TO HEAVEN. Ironically, my thoughts turn straight to suicide, an action not commonly rewarded with eternal salvation.

For the past 12 months, Chris Town has obsessively filled small, spiral-bound notepads with words he encounters daily— always seen, never heard.

The resulting works, composed of layered text, represent the constant barrage of information we face and the cognitive overload we subconsciously sift through. By editing these collected words and presenting them as singular statements—later repainted and reformatted—Town imbues them with new, personal meaning. This process involves reframing both the semantic intent and the visual representation of specific word combinations, offering new ways of perceiving language. This exhibition serves as a record of those words: what they mean to the artist, and what they may mean to you.

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.