Passing Through
Group Show
12 June – 4 July 2026
Jess Swney, Lewis Vivian Cosgrave, Jackson Harry and Hugo Van Dorsser
To move through a street is to collect its elements and digest. Its windows and weeds build into the landscape of a city, each alley fleshing out its brick and mortar into something more tangible - a pace, a rhythm of life.In Twentysix Gallery’s new group exhibition ‘Passing Through’ is the transitory place of ‘between’ - corners and a backyard, parked cars and sidewalks - are all subject to Jess Swney, Lewis Vivian Cosgrave, Jackson Harry and Hugo Van Dorsser’s material presence. A slow piecing together and remaking of cityscapes - abroad and at home.
Each of the four artists work closely with their respective materials in distinct processes, all of which allow for a certain sense of memory. Jess’s newest works draw on her time in Morocco on residency last year, where she learnt traditional weaving techniques from local artisans. Now, while on a new residency in Berlin, her tufted rug ‘paintings’ look back at this time - documenting geometric motifs of window guards she observed while there - domestic and architectural details, patterns and repeated forms, rendered by repetition and a labour intensive process.
For Lewis, images of the everyday Aotearoa are collected over time. Traces left behind, residue from the streets he has wandered are translated into fleeting images that are gradually softened, edited and reworked through a transfer process and paint. Repetition, erosion, and layering - embedding presence of maker into the work and finding the pulse of a certain sweet monotony. Streets walked as part of daily routine, the back garden in which you stare at each evening. Tender. A dazed memory.
Where there is softness, there is always the opposing to be found. Jackson’s bronze objects grounding the gallery in a feeling of nostalgia, of industry. Now based in Melbourne, the artist works with a reverence for traditional materials and technique. His sculptures of cars ‘frozen in place’ are both solid and weathered, eroded - coloured patina becoming a motif of passing time and an industrial quality that has been lost to years of change.
Speaking from the same vein of nostalgia, Hugo’s paintings are an exploration of the innocence of childhood, and the subconscious who still visits there. With a primary colour palette and stickfigure illustrations of ponytails and flying cars, his is a world that imagines the street in recollection. Separating us from the years of change that both swell streets then steal them away from a city, a village. Years that see our growing footprint, and build a lingering afterimage at the corner of our eye. An echo of our steps through a place, passing through.
INSTALLATION VIEWS
ARTWORKS
THE ARTISTs
As if we were an outsider looking in on a dream, Hugo Van Dorsser's paintings are a manifestation of nostalgia - emotionally charged, playful and surreal.
The Christchurch based artist merges his own personal history with imagined narratives, balancing his compositions between graphic and bold, to a more fluid movement and diffused brush stroke. Working with familiar objects from our collective childhood, naive stick figures and primary colours, Van Dorsser’s canvases invite us into a surge of memory, finding where these images live within our subconscious and where they stand now.
To work with wool is to entangle yourself in its threads - Jess Swney’s tufted rug ‘paintings’ working as a manifestation of her hands - each stitch acting as a mark of care, time and self. Embracing the subtleties of flaw and human presence behind each work to discuss self-discovery, unconscious biases and vulnerability.
Holding a First Class Honour in Fine Arts from Massey University, the Tāmaki Makaurau based artist is grounded in an intergenerational connection to textiles, as she floats between abstraction and realism. Creating a softness with wool tufted illustrations depicted in a deep, bold colour palette, that simultaneously reminisce on the tradition of textile craft, while concurrently using it to speak to contemporary womanhood. How we face society, and how society faces back to us.
It is the everyday—a frame caught while falling. Cropped into a leg mid step, a backyard blurred behind—a moment that becomes a memory. Intimate and undefined.
Lewis Vivian Cosgrave (Ngāti Pūkenga, b.1997) primarily focuses on the experience of the quotidian. His work captures transitory moments—a life found along concrete pavements, in the backseat of a car, in glimpses of inner city gardens, blending painting, drawing and photographic practices. Through a refined sense of surface and delicate use of colour, Cosgrave brings an intentional reticence to his work—altering collected and personal archive imagery through saturation, erasure and muddying. Arriving eventually to a space that grants us momentary reflection on our everyday—on the mundanity and transience that surrounds us. Cosgrave is based in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours).
Jackson Harry, born in Palmerston North, 1992, is a musician and visual artist who resides in Dunedin and Melbourne. Harry's work has been exhibited in galleries in New Zealand and Australia since 2021.
Harry creates bronze sculptures using the lost-wax process, a traditional casting technique, finishing his work using methods of traditional patina or burning layers of acrylic to bronze and weathering down with wet stone. Harry has developed a colouring process which exposes the bronze on certain pieces. This weathering becomes a motif, like the sinking & simplified forms, revealing layers of nostalgia and lament for the symbols of past industry.
For this series of work, Harry continues to develop his interest in industrial modes of production that are increasingly associated with the archaic. The heft of a handmade metal object contrasts with the levity of the colour palette.