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As if revealed by a child's kaleidoscope, the image turns in on itself; ceaselessly shifting, dissolving, consuming itself. Around its border, the Maori fern motif the koru unfurls from a 1960s Pucci pattern which morphs into the black kowhaiwhai design found on canoes, the symbol of movement and Maori migration. And so the eye travels swiftly across an ocean of imagery both lost and found: swathes of wallpaper and op-shop fabric swatches circling the Maori concept of the dark centre of creation; the surface dissolving into particles of glitter dust.

One of the first works visitors will see on entering Queensland Art Gallery's Gallery of Modern Art for the 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT6) , Reuben Paterson's Whakapapa: get down on your knees, 2009, is a billboard-sized homage to the artist's heritage – particularly to his kuia or grandmother, whose exuberant life ended sadly in suicide. Paterson's work is a modern, visual rendering of the Maori oral tradition of whakapapa or recounting geneology; a process of layering that ties past, present and future. Not only considered a high art form, it is also a prodigious feat of memory, evolving nowadays with the incorporation of written text, computer technology and visual art.

As with many of the over 100 artists contained within APT6, this Auckland-based artist of mixed Ngati Rangitihi and Scottish ancestry layers the traditional within the contemporary, employing the tropes of consumerist society and the medium of pop art to convey a message that is at once immediate and otherworldly, seductive to the eye yet bittersweet in taste ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2009 issue.