Zac Langdon-Pole

Zac Langdon-Pole pieces together and augments objects and images in unexpected ways. A practice investigating the making and unmaking of meaning through unlikely connections of objects, images, and stories reveals in the artist’s words a “fascination with composites, with aggregates, with where does one thing end and another begin?”

This description makes Zac Langdon-Pole’s practice sound playful, based in small acts of curious deployment of things, ideas, and words—the tangible and intangible, perceptible and imagined. And there is an element of play as it might be understood as testing the parameters and potential of the world—its material forms and organising principles. But Langdon-Pole’s work is far from whimsical. It is steeped in an array of knowledge systems, picking away at their complexities but also their ambiguities and absurdities when brushed up against each other. There is a little of everything—the science of materials (metals, polymers, ceramics, composites) and the natural sciences (astronomy, physics, chemistry, earth science, biology), philosophy, literature, art, history, zoology, botany, anthropology, photography—deployed with erudition but through the idiosyncratic processes of art.

After leaving his hometown of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in 2014 to undertake postgraduate studies at the prestigious Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Langdon-Pole was based in Berlin until the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Following his return for a solo exhibition at Michael Lett in early 2020 Langdon-Pole remained in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, presenting a major solo exhibition Containing Multitudes later that year at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi and further subsequent exhibitions at Michael Lett, 2022, as well as at Station Melbourne, 2021 with Daniel Boyd, and Station Sydney, 2023, whilst also continuing to exhibit in international group exhibitions. Langdon-Pole held a McCahon House Residency in 2022 and in 2024 is presenting large-scale object works at Waiheke Sculpture on the Gulf and in Asia Pacific Triennial 11 at QAGOMA [Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art].

Langdon-Pole’s work takes multiple forms, stitching together and assembling elements in ways that are endlessly associative, directing the viewer down pathways of source histories; social and political, ecological and industrial, intellectual and familial—at the same time as encouraging flights of imagination. He has repurposed borer-perforated wooden furniture (see Au Hazard (borer cabinet), 2016), objects materialising the incompatibility of local timber and beetles introduced from Europe. As with these furniture works in Punctatum (Library), 2020, he treated such damage in old native timber flooring with gold infill, flipping preconceptions of value and purpose, whilst quietly pointing to one of the many drivers of colonisation in the clamour for mineral wealth. His works have featured taxidermy birds; fragments of ceramics across the ages stapled together in rudimentary collisions of culture and history (Translatio Studii (Revisited), 2022); children’s learning aids (Assimilation Study, 2020, or in The Same River Twice, 2022, augmented with a single wedge object created from meteorite rock); apparently celestial photographic images that are actually derived from photograms of sand collected from sites of significance to Western exploration histories, cultural collision, and imperialism in the Pacific (for example, Te Whanganui-A-Hei / Cooks Beach 12.06.2019, 2019); a montage of filmed Aotearoa New Zealand landscapes drawn from an array of historical sources (Breath as Breath, 2020); rocks; rulers; fossils; anatomical models; and archaeological fragments.

Two recent sculptural assemblages highlight the associative actions generated in his work. Each is emphatically a singular physical entity to be situated in space, but also a composite collection of elements. Concatenations, 2022, is the more overtly figurative, a “body” composed of a sculptural base, a “torso” of wooden cases and drawers, topped with a cluster of geological material. A Quiver of Names, 2022, is a stack of drawers and typewriters, unnerving in its invitation to yet rejection of touch, the keys of the typewriters having been replaced with arrowheads ranging from the Neolithic to the Ottoman periods.

The surrealist action of yoking together material incongruities is clear here, as in many other series of works including the Passport (Argonauta) works of 2018 with their inserted meteorite fragments in paper nautilus shells for which Langdon-Pole was awarded the BMW Art Journey Prize 2018 at Art Basel. Nevertheless, the surrealism designation sits awkwardly with this practice. Whilst theories of cognition and symbolic recognition clearly interest Langdon-Pole, the unexpected juxtapositions of material forms and epistemologies in his work are less celebrations of the unconscious than exhortations to rational, conscious enquiry into relationships between the stuff of the physical world, the narrative histories it is caught up in, and seemingly uncontainable abstract concepts. Big ideas proliferate. Non-human centred and ecological patterns of being. Deep time—cosmic time, geological time. Historical time—the time of making-culture, of shaping societies, and of the conflict that unfolds through travel, trade, and trafficking. Violent dispossession and occupation. The imposition of Western structures of governance, language, thought. The historical making of Empire and new possibilities for its unmaking.

Most recently the jigsaw puzzle has provided Langdon-Pole with a means to pursue these interests. Watching his nephew play with puzzles during lockdown the artist noted the standard die-cut used across puzzles with otherwise very different subjects, making the puzzle an ideal form through which to bind together very different images. In pursuing this form Langdon-Pole has created an array of works which juxtapose images, histories, and knowledge structures. Langdon-Pole describes his practice as one of “trying to figure out how things relate in the world.” He asks, “what belongs where? How do we order the world?” Art, for Langdon-Pole, “can provide a twist to how we normally look at the world.” And “the jigsaw puzzle by its very nature is about assembling order.”

The most recent jigsaw works, exhibited at Station Gallery, Sydney, in late 2023 as Entity Studies, show Langdon-Pole introducing a further element, a third or “ghost” image to the amalgam of two puzzles. In each work two very different images have been laid into each other to create an outline or silhouette image, sometimes difficult to initially discern. Drawing on cognitive science and specifically “Mooney” images which utilise two tones to create simplified forms that test perception, or specifically the question of how much information is required to “recognise” or assemble an image, the artist is questioning how much prior experience informs what we see in the world. “How is it that we make the world? How is it that we shape the world based on what we’ve already seen?”

The titles of the Entity Studies work provide clues to recognising their ghost images: “Frog,” “Pansy,” “Parrot,” “Cinderella Castle,” “Feathers.” The source material of their puzzles ranges widely: eighteenth and nineteenth century landscape paintings, a museum photograph, a seventeenth century allegorical painting, marbled endpapers from a nineteenth century edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] space photographs. These works call to the “profound fragility” of the puzzle; formal, conceptual, emotional, material. Afterall, whilst beautifully produced in their final form as works of art, they can fall apart so easily in the making. Langdon-Pole has each puzzle printed and produced on a large scale at a specialist puzzle manufacturer in Hong Kong. Each comprises 8,000 pieces. They are packed in smaller sections and shipped to the studio in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland where the artist and an assistant lay a template over them delineating the third image and then slowly swap out pieces to create a final work out of a pair of puzzles.

Aspects from these puzzle works—three-dimensional assemblages passing as two-dimensional collages—act also as the kernels for large sculptural works currently being developed by the artist. In Feathers, 2023, Langdon-Pole brought together a twentieth century photograph of staff at the American Natural History Museum replacing a Brontosaurus skull on a museum display and a sixteenth century painting by Guiseppe Arcimboldio (The Four Elements: Air, ca. 1566). The artist is fascinated by the manner in which the Brontosaurus is already a fictional hybrid—a Frankenstein-like figure, being the result of human error, the nineteenth century museological mistake of connecting the skull of one long-necked dinosaur with the body of another.

In 2024 Langdon-Pole is scaling up, extending this concept of the dinosaur as hybrid construction in an outdoor sculptural work Chimera, 2024, on Waiheke Island, suspending a dinosaur skull from a crane that in turn acts as the skeletal body of this new overtly human-constructed, industrial dinosaur. Similarly, Langdon-Pole will be extrapolating upon the Classical Greek allegory of The Bird in Borrowed Feathers that filtered through a seventeenth century Dutch painting was at the heart of the Pansy, 2023, jigsaw work—another story of appropriation and composite identity—for a new sculptural work for APT11 later in the year. “I find a lot of humility in that moment of assembling things from different parts and making something new—it’s what art is.” The fictions and the flaws as much as the revelations.

This profile was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 66 

All works courtesy of the artist, Michael Lett and STATION, Australia

EXHIBITION
Zac Langdon-Pole 
28 July 2024 
James St | Art on James, Brisbane