It began at TAFE, hobbling on crutches with a broken ankle from skateboarding. It began in a neighbour’s darkroom as a teenager. Now, twenty years later, Sam Stephenson returns to the analogue source, printing his latest project in a Marrickville darkroom.

“You Can’t Miss What You’ve Never Had” is the culmination of a ten-year period, a direct continuation of his 2015 exhibition ‘Fake Nostalgia’. With a camera always at hand, Stephenson’s approach has evolved from spontaneity to a more posed, contemplative practice, yet his focus remains unwavering: his peers, his friends, his community.

His mother observed his subject is “the common man going about their everyday life.” This exhibition brings that world to light—a world of skateboarding, music, and art. It’s a archive of a decade, reflecting on absent friends, new friends, and the quiet poetry of friends holding cats. By projecting onto light-sensitive paper, he creates nothing too ordinary, but something deeply personal: a captured history, made by hand, against the digital grain.

Mim Libro’s work drifts between light and shadow. Spirits, cherubs, and childlike motifs rise to the surface, yet beneath them lies an undercurrent of longing, escape, and the desire to step outside one’s own body. The paintings are rooted in memory, showing the playfulness of childhood through a darker lens, where wonder and imagination exist as both sanctuary and disguise.

This sense of balance between light and dark is embodied in her range - while larger works move in greyscale, their shadows charged with unease, the colourful creatures on paper feel like guides or guardians, offering a sense of reprieve. Libro’s use of airbrush gives these figures a softness, a fresh haze, as if they hover just out of reach.

Playing Make Believe embraces play as an act of departure and return. It presents a chance to slip into another mode, to wander imagined worlds, to break free from that which feels permanent and immovable. These works ask you to dwell in that threshold - between shadow and light, sorrow and joy, self and other and to make room beyond yourself.

China Heights Gallery, in collaboration with Louis Vuitton, presents a new exhibition of works by Australian artists Banjo McLachlan, Rachel Rutt, and Gabriel Cole. Hosted at the Louis Vuitton Brisbane flagship, the show brings together three distinct practices that explore visual culture, memory, and emotional expression.

Banjo McLachlan, Born and raised in Newport on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, was introduced to photography at a young age by his father. His fascination with the craft saw him leave school to pursue photography studies, leading him into a career as a paparazzi photographer, capturing high-profile celebrities visiting Australia.

Relocating to New York, he expanded his focus to documentary photography, shifting from the realm of fame to documenting the rich stories of ordinary people and exploring the essence of urban life. Early exposure to photography fostered an appreciation for scanning, developing, and printing, shaping his artistic foundation. Influenced by music, skateboarding culture, and the aesthetics of 90s and 00s fashion photography, he draws inspiration from the interactions between people and their environments, merging these elements with his perspective and evolving practice.

Rachel Rutt’s (b.1990) work observes humanity’s instinct for the nomadic and migratory, polarised against outcomes of alienation and isolation borne innate to the experience of Diaspora. Assimilation and adaptation, strained by the necessity of refuge, unearth a hunger for existence exceeding mere survival. Can the process of evolution redefine belonging? Does the landscape transform in response? This catalyst is the subject of Rutt’s curiosity. Comprised of woven mediums, whose warp and weft are manipulated to emulate the pathways of physical migration, the interplay of colliding worlds, chance, harmony, and adaptive reaction, Rutt’s work pays homage to both personal and shared experiences of Diaspora through the universal mechanism of weaving. Silken transparencies provoke memories and interpret history, conveying rhythm persistent in spite of chaos.

Gabriel Cole is an artist and designer based in Naarm/Melbourne, originally from Adelaide. His multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, painting, film, sound, and textiles, adapting fluidly to the conceptual demands of each body of work. Cole’s work is rooted in the exploration of semiotics and motifs, often incorporating signage and branding as visual and emotional entities. His approach combines a meticulous painterly technique with an embrace of organic imperfection, creating layered compositions where refined craftsmanship meets spontaneous abstraction. Materials are torn, folded, and disrupted, allowing for natural deconstruction while maintaining a deliberate sense of balance and form.

McLachlan, Rutt, and Cole challenge us to look deeper. By re-engaging with analog processes, their work masterfully explores the space between reality and illusion, past and present. In doing so, they reveal the profound power of images to shape new narratives and evoke unexpected emotions.