ZAC LANGDON-POLE

Central to the exhibition are large-scale jigsaw puzzles made up of more than 128,000 individual puzzle pieces. This new suite of major works cleverly re-combines images taken from 19th century Romantic landscape paintings with the latest images from NASA’s Hubble and James Webb Space telescopes.

With these immense jigsaw-puzzle works, titled The Dog God Cycle, Langdon-Pole explores the hidden connections between paintings of 19th century colonial territories with NASA’s imaging of the depths of the universe and examines the idea of ‘the new world’ in completely unexpected ways.

The artist employs what he calls “ghost templates” which are inspired by figure/ground pictures used in psychology. For The Dog-God Cycle Langdon-Pole co-opts this technique so that viewers will find themselves questioning how images function as well as the very ways they view and perceive the world.

A whole host of additional sculptural artworks have been crafted from an astounding range of objects and materials, reflecting Langdon-Pole’s interest in vast human histories and knowledges including geology, astronomy and environmental sciences.

The materials and objects used include ancient arrowheads, typewriters, historic ceramic fragments, meteorites, magnets, mollusk shells, fossils, crystals, metric rulers, educational toys, semi-precious gemstones and borer-ridden wooden furniture that has been restored with gold leaf.

Together these diverse materials and large-scale artworks enable what the artist has called a “poetry of looking.”

Porous World uses images and objects to look at the various ways knowledge and culture have been transferred throughout human history. Guided by a relentless curiosity and applying a tender scrutiny to the world around him, Langdon-Pole creates enigmatic artworks that trace the myriad historical forces that have deposited us into the present.