Curated by — Lucy Kennedy
Studio One – Toi Tū
Medieval Magical Girl
Jessica Miku
12 March – 9 April
You’ve heard of Magical Girls. You’ve heard of Knights. But have you heard of the Medieval Magical Girl? Drawing from their experience as Japanese/Pakehã, Jessica Miku blends the sparkle of magical girl anime with the lore of medieval chivalry to conjure a hybrid-heroine. They explore tenderness and belonging, creating lush worlds of quiet power and emotional resonance – a place where magic is ancient, and the future is forged from the past.
1 Ponsonby Road
studioone.org.nz
OrexART
Viky Garden
14 March
Viky Garden is best known for her intense, probing self-portraits. Her 35-year artistic practice is informed by an intimate yet universal empathy, an exploration of the human condition located in a profoundly personal understanding of the female experience. Her work is instantly recognisable – uncompromising, psychologically discerning, and emotionally resonant. Garden’s socio-political perspectives are simultaneously precise and ambiguous, creating a tension in her work that is unsettlingly subtle and provocatively compelling.
221 Ponsonby Road
orexart.co.nz
Melanie Roger Gallery
Ua lavu
Claudia Jowitt
11 March –2 April
Jowitt’s practice is steeped in the histories and language of abstraction, drawing on a lineage of artists who have pushed paint beyond the frame – into sculptural space. Yet her work also charts its own course, carrying with it motifs and materials that bring together these two quite different currents in her work: shell, coral, masi, and seaweed are inlaid into surfaces thick with paint, resin and other mediums creating a vista of delicate, yet intensely detailed, reliefs.
444 Karangahape Road
melanierogergallery.com
Bergman Gallery
So’otaga, Everything Carries Forward
Alison Leauanae & Taja Vaetoru
7-28 March
So’otaga, Everything Carries Forward brings together Taja Vaetoru and Alison Leauanae in a dialogue on lineage, migration and continuity. So’otaga – connection – extends beyond ancestry to the transmission of memory, belief and gesture. Vaetoru draws on Polynesian cosmologies and the tension between absence and presence. Paint becomes a space where personal histories are carried and reimagined. Leauanae’s hand-stitched lines operate like coordinates – mapping movement, reordering notions of home, and holding inherited knowledge. The exhibition proposes that nothing is isolated: each mark, each thread, carries something forward.
3/582 Karangahape Road
bergmangallery.com
Anna Miles Gallery
Plain Sight
Sara McIntyre
Until 21 March
When Baudelaire defined the flâneur in 1863, he couldn’t have imagined a nurse in Aotearoa a-century-and-a-half later: a woman in her 60s driving remote routes through Te Rohe Pōtae, stopping to take photographs on her iPhone. Plain Sight invites contemplation of McIntyre’s ‘nurse’s eye view’. McIntyre’s careful attentiveness is shaped by the fact that she is embedded in the communities she photographs, dwelling in the familiar.
10/30 Upper Queen Street
annamilesgallery.com
