
Creation Myth
IN THE DARK ROOM at the start of “Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art” at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Robert Jahnke’s Whenua Kore, 2019, glows. The piece consists of a ring of white neon, which, through a trick of mirrored glass, seems to endlessly repeat and retreat deep into the wall on which it hangs, like a tunnel. Move in front of it, and the tunnel seems to bend. Two things are caught in its black reflection: on the opposite wall, Reuben Paterson’s kaleidoscopic digital animation Te Pūtahitanga ō Rehua (The Constellation of Rehua), 2005, and, floating somewhere between