The first work in Michael Parekowhai’s “The Promised Land” — the New Zealand artist’s largest exhibition to date — is approached from behind. A 23-foot-high replica of a suburban house located in western Auckland, it’s re-created in all its boxy, post-Depression-era, tangerine-painted glory, and the entrance is through the back door. Commissioned for the exhibition, Memory Palace is named after the mnemonic device ( also known as method of loci ) by which a person visualizes his or her home or another well-known space, placing items to be remembered in this mental map and creating links through association with the intimately familiar. The piece leaves its imprint even after one exits through its front door into the rest of the show, viewers remaining in a memory palace of sorts for its duration — partly of Parekowhai’s making and partly their own.Occupying the interior of the orange house is a star player in Australian and New Zealand history books: the great James Cook, not actually the first European to discover Australia though often thought of as such. This Cook is monumental in size but captured in a pose not normally memorialized in statuary. He’s pensive, pondering a course of action or reeling from a momentous decision. Seen first from the back, he is slumped, feet teetering just off the floor, unstable atop a tripod chair — a monument the exact opposite of statuesque. Crafted of stainless steel and sitting more than eight feet high, he reflects and dwarfs the room. It’s titled The English Channel, it mirrors all who look at it, and it doesn’t reveal exactly what it’s trying to say.Who is being helped to remember what? Parekowhai is known for casting allusions to disparate points of reference in his work but won’t necessarily reveal how they come together to form meaning. Interpretation will depend on the viewer’s points of knowledge. Cook certainly sailed the English Channel, though he is not generally associated with it. Is the channel here the one he opened up for European colonialists? How does this implicate viewers when they look at their reflection in its surface?The majority of the rooms that follow are small, and at times cramped — purposely so but to great effect. These aren’t expansive white-walled galleries; they’re more akin to the rooms you’d expect in the family home encountered just before, with the occasional low ceiling, narrow hall, and carpeted floor. The artwork bears down. Parekowhai’s sculptures and installations generally manifest in large scale, and are usually exhibited in spaces that match, though perhaps also dilute, their magnitude. With the exception of the spacious final room — where an audience can sit and watch regular performances of musicians playing on the artist’s fire-engine-red piano carved with Maori iconography, He Korero Purakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: story of a New Zealand river, 2011 ( shown at that year’s Venice biennale ) — the exhibition spaces press the viewer into an intimate tangle with the work. There’s no way not to engage: You have to crane your neck to see the Steinway balanced on the tip of a seal’s nose, looking like it’s going to fall ( The Horn of Africa, 2006 ), navigate around delicate sapling branches ( The Moment of Cubism, 2009, and Constitution Hill, 2009), and take care not to trip over the bronze-cast spades, rifles, pitchforks, and rifles strewn about the floor ( Acts III, 2015 ).No matter what your interpretation, there’s no not getting it. In The Past in the Present, 2013, shiny golf balls are scattered about the floor and takeout-coffee lids are pinned to the wall. An Australian visitor might think the gaudy carpet underfoot looks a lot like the flooring choice in one of the many Returned Service League clubs around the country; a Maori viewer might recognize that the golf-ball and coffee-lid clusters are set out in the formation of the constellation Matariki ( the Pleiades ), the appearance of which in early June is celebrated as the start of the Maori calendar.By declining to explain, or even emphasize all of his references, Parekowhai lets this promised land be made up of whatever memories and associations each individual audience member brings to the work at hand. That’s not to suggest that the artist isn’t saying something, as much of what he makes is inherently political. His strength is that his pieces don’t fixate on a single message but, rather, contain and allow for overlapping layers of story — some of which will be the viewer’s own. The success of this exhibition is that the intimate, familiar space crafted by Parekowhai is one where these collective and singular histories can be considered alongside one another.A version of this article appears in the June 2015 issue of Modern Painters.
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