Paranoid Visions
Works by John Mulvany and Leon Alesi
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, May 23, 7-10pm
ON VIEW: May 23 – June 13, 2026
Cloud Tree Gallery is pleased to present Paranoid Visions, an exhibition by Leon Alesi and John Mulvany, on view from Saturday May 23 through Friday June 12.
Borrowing its title from a 1980/1990’s Irish punk band, the exhibition features paintings, photographs, mixed-media collages, and at its center a deer blind constructed inside the gallery, its exterior clad in distressed domestic wallpaper — a collision of hunting culture, media consumption, and the architecture of fear.
Simultaneously a shelter and surveillance post, the deer blind has historically served as a structure of concealment and controlled vision. Paranoid Visions relocates this logic from the landscape into the home, arguing that the American living room has become its own kind of blind — a site of waiting, watching, and target acquisition mediated by cable news, algorithmic feeds and the ambient dread of the contemporary information landscape. The inside is projected outward as fear has moved into our domestic spaces.
Paranoid Visions asks what it costs to live inside this structure — and whether, from within it, the outside world can be seen at all.
Painting by John Mulvany
About the Artists
Leon Alesi is a self taught multi-disciplinary artist who hails from New Jersey and has lived in Austin, Texas for the past 30 years. His work is both an archeological dig and a document of transitional situations investigating our spiritual, communal, and physical loss. Using his neighborhood as a reference guide for global realities, he records his personal experience for future archivists to consider. From 2012 to 2018 he co-curated and ran Blackbox, an in-house gallery space that promoted local talent. He joined the ICOSA collective in 2018 with a focus on creating opportunities for the growing community of artists in Austin and furthering his artistic practice.
Photo by Leon Alesi