11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

BORN 1988, TĀMAKI MAKAURAU (AUCKLAND), AOTEAROA NEWZEALAND LIVES+WORKS INTĀMAKI MAKAURAU NOTES 1 Édouard Glissant, quoted in ‘The West is not the West: Zac Langdon-Pole in conversation with András Szántó’, in Constellations: Zac Langdon Pole’s Art Journey , Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin, 2020, p.31. 2 Zac Langdon-Pole, Asia Pacific Triennial proposal , QAGOMA Curatorial File, 22 November 2023. 3 Tim Alves, ‘Captain Cook’s axe’, West Space Journal , <journal.westspace.org.au/article/captain- cooks-axe/>, viewed June 2024. of a seemingly banal subject is a one-to-one scale reproduction of an iconic sculpture from the history of European art — albeit with the human figures removed. Seeking to foreground that which is often overlooked in our subconscious focus on the human, Langdon-Pole’s Memory Garden is haunted by absent figures, many of whom in the artist’s words ‘may be a lingering after‑image of our memory’. 2 With these sculptures, the artist is asking us to examine the archetypes of European knowledge, art and philosophy anew. Langdon-Pole’s final work in the Triennial, Another World Inside this One 2024 is loosely based on the antipodean saying, ‘it’s like Captain Cook’s axe’ — a reference to an object that has been altered so many times that little remains of its original material. Though there is scant proof that Captain James Cook ever had, or wrote about, his own axe, this saying flows from a common belief that he did, and that the head of the tool was replaced twice and the handle six times, leaving nothing of the original object. 3 Langdon-Pole takes this concept a step further, in that he carves and paints the American hickory handle of a store-bought axe to resemble the tree sapling from which the wood would have been cut for its manufacture. For many familiar with the saying, the importance of the tree — destroyed to craft the handle — is not even considered. The artist therefore points to the way in which deep connections to the natural world nurtured by the indigenous inhabitants of Oceania have been both overlooked and actively destroyed by European colonisers in their domination of these lands and their histories. Acknowledging the origins of our personal and national histories can often feel bewildering; however, the poetic openness of Zac Langdon-Pole’s works shows us that, when we abandon the familiar, we are able to enter newly expanded realms that are alive to the rich wonders of our world and our place in it. RUTHMcDOUGALL I cannot imagine, nor would I want to live in a world without difference . . . Difference coming into relation is what creates the world. Édouard Glissant 1 Like the sentiment of this quote from Caribbean author and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s influential book Poetics of Relation (1990), Aotearoa New Zealand artist Zac Langdon-Pole is interested in how different histories, materials, people and processes shape and enrich our understanding of the world. Working primarily with collage and assemblage, many of the artist’s constructions juxtapose and recontextualise materials, textures, objects and histories. The outcome of these pairings and combinations are surprising, often unravelling what we thought we knew. Made up of more than 64 000 individual puzzle pieces, Langdon-Pole’s large-scale works in the Asia Pacific Triennial reconfigure images of nineteenth-century romantic landscape paintings, the marbled endpapers of volumes of encyclopedias, mythological paintings, and the latest images from NASA’s Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. Inspired by the way we use prior experience to make sense of Rorschach ink-blots, Langdon-Pole’s carefully recombined puzzles of two very different images create a third abstracted image — or what the artist refers to as a ‘ghost stencil’ — with its own meaning and purpose. On display amid the kaleidoscopic colour of Langdon-Pole’s jigsaw puzzle piece works is a new series of marble sculptures. Positioned discreetly within the space and reminiscent of an arrangement of Zen garden contemplation stones, these works resemble what appear to be rocks, foliage and statuary drapery. Collectively titled Memory Garden 2024, each carving Pansy 2023 / Recombined jigsaw puzzles: Melchior d’Hondecoeter The Crow Exposed c.1680; Konstantinos Volanakis Argo 19th century / 196.8 x 150.5 x 4cm / Courtesy: The artist and STATION, Melbourne and Sydney ZACLANGDON-POLE ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 132 — 133