Bringing together standout works and emerging voices from across the city’s best spaces.
CURATED BY —
LUCY KENNEDY
Artspace Aotearoa
CRIT: Art learning since 1987
Group Show
18 July – 26 September
This exhibition explores how artists, educators, and communities have learned inside, beside, outside, around, and against institutions in Aotearoa and beyond since the late 1980s. Rather than presenting a single model for the future of art education, CRIT brings together many different ways of learning, making, and being together.
292 Karangahape Road
SANDERSON CONTEMPORARY
Botanical Correspondents
Julia Holderness
26 August – 13 September
In Botanical Correspondents, Holderness’ research considers and responds to the work of Emily Harris, one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s first professional woman artists. Emily Cumming Harris (1837-1925) is best-known for painting the indigenous flora of Aotearoa, producing hundreds of artworks in her studio in Whakatū Nelson. One hundred years after her death, her remarkable paintings continue to captivate audiences and invite them to contemplate the beauty of the natural world. In this exhibition Holderness responds creatively to her life, work and artistic practices.
2-4 Kent Street, Newmarket
Gus Fisher Gallery
Phone Tree
Lucy Meyle
29 May – 22 August
Through drawing, casting and intricate lacework, Lucy Meyle’s Phone Tree centres around moth traps that lure ‘pest’ species with pseudo-pheromones and catch them in nets or on sticky paper. Through this project, Meyle adapts these surveillance and control devices for humorously different ends, reframing them as narrative holders which are interfered with by the moths themselves. Rather than destructive tools for determining the presence of a pest, in Meyle’s work the moth traps serve as inadvertent collectors of moth memory, drama, and dreaming.
74 Shortland Street
Melanie Roger Gallery
Various Aquaria
Erica van Zon
30 July – 22 August
Erica van Zon turns to the aquarium as both subject and system – an enclosed ecology of circulation, display, and controlled life. Rather than presenting aquariums as serene or purely decorative, Various Aquaria emphasises their constructedness. Light refracts unevenly; forms hover between clarity and distortion; species appear suspended in a carefully maintained instability. The works hold a subtle tension between attention and control, care and containment. At the same time, this exhibition remains attentive to van Zon’s broader interest in humour, slippage, and re-seeing the everyday.
444 Karangahape Road
DEPOT Artspace
Paintress
Jessica Pearless
22 August – 23 October
A Devonport local, Paintress celebrates Jessica’s longstanding relationship with the DEPOT, having had her first exhibition at the gallery in 1999 as a first year student at ELAM, University of Auckland. The exhibition is part of DEPOTs 30th Anniversary programme for 2026. Working across geometric abstraction in painting, sculpture and site-responsive installation, Pearless examines the enduring relevance of abstraction in art. Through carefully constructed surfaces, spatial interventions and textile based works, Paintress considers painting as an embodied act of making.
28 Clarence Street, Devonport
Gow Langsford
the first incision I saw I dreamed no more
John Pule
1 August – 5 September
John Pule’s upcoming exhibition the first incision I saw I dreamed no more presents a body of recent paintings and works on paper shaped by memory, spirituality, and lived experience in Niue. Layered with vivid colour and symbolic imagery, the works continue Pule’s deeply personal exploration of identity, environment, and ancestral knowledge. Both painterly and poetic, these works reaffirm Pule’s singular ability to merge autobiography, mythology, and place into a richly evocative visual language.
4 Princes Street, Onehunga
