STATION is delighted to present a solo exhibition of new work by New Zealand artist Zac Langdon-Pole. This will be Langdon-Pole’s first exhibition in Sydney, Australia. The exhibition continues Langdon-Pole’s current modus operandi of recombined jigsaw puzzles. Having found that pieces from different jigsaw puzzles can fit perfectly together he has applied this method to create enigmatic and poetic collages. Entity Studies is a new series of puzzle works that employ a third image or ‘ghost stencil’ which haunts the combination of two distinct images. Spanning the spectrum of abstraction and figuration, the works ask viewers to trace the moment when one thing can become another. Langdon-Pole’s investigation into visual perception stems from cognitive science studies, which use two-tone black and white images, known as ‘Mooney images’, to test the laws of ‘closure’. By reducing an image to its most abstracted palette of purely dark and light tones, reminiscent of Rorschach ink-blot tests, scientists can understand how prior experience and ‘best guess inference’ shapes our perception. Pushing these cognitive experiments to their extreme, Langdon-Pole layers connections between such disparate images as: recent NASA space telescope photographs, 19th century colonial landscape paintings, marbled paper bookends of taxonomic encyclopaedias, and mythological fable paintings such as ‘The Ship of Theseus’ and ‘The Bird in the Borrowed Feathers’. With this new body of work Langdon-Pole seeks to unravel historical mythologies that shape our present. image: Zac Langdon-Pole, Feathers, 2023, recombined jigsaw puzzles of: Photo: ’Replacing the Sculpted Brontosaurus Skull’ (20th c.), American Natural History Museum; The Four Elements (Air) (ca. 1566), Giuseppe Arcimboldo 197 x 150 x 4 cm. Photo: Sam Hartnett. Courtesy the artist and STATION.