Exhibition Launch
Ammon Ngakuru and Kahurangiariki Smith
Time and location
SAT 21 MAR 2026, 4–6pm
Please join us to celebrate the launch of two exhibitions, Ammon Ngakuru: Telltale (a dog) and a new exhibition by Kahurangiariki Smith.
With the decision to focus on painting for Telltale (a dog), Ngakuru challenges his own practice and artistic conventions. Beginning, again, at the very start: how do you get to an image? In a painting process that is intuitive and responsive to emerging forms, shapes and colour themes, the artist remains always perceptible and open to change. The narrative of the newly created works, rests in the space in-between that can be defined by is indefinability and contradictions: interiors and exteriors, intimate and personal memories and feelings with outside observations, hidden clues and clear symbols, signs of comfort next to markers of danger populate this new series. Recurring motifs appear and dissolve, suggesting shifting states of attention and, maybe, the instability of meaning (and its production) itself. With Telltale (a dog), Ngakuru purposefully works against an easy readability, inviting viewers to inhabit the uncertainty rather than resolve it. To feel rather than understand.
Kahurangiariki Smith (Te Arawa, Tainui, Takitimu, Horouta and Mataatua) illustrates these ancestral beings not as mythical curiosities but as living presences inhabiting the gallery space. Through digital animation, bedazzled velvet, sparkles and stars, Smith, in her nostalgic y2k aesthetic, pays close attention to the multiplicity of taniwha and their role in our daily lives.
Ways to engage
Ammon Ngakuru |Telltale (a dog)
The first solo exhibition by Ammon Ngakuru that focuses on his painting practice.
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Kahurangiariki Smith
Taniwha are among the most profound figures in te ao Māori as guardians, ancestors, warnings, and gu
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