Artwork information

'The Dog God Cycle', 2022 comes from a suite of large-scale jigsaw puzzles made up of more than 128,000 individual pieces that were exhibited in Zac Langdon-Pole’s 2022 exhibition Porous World. This immense work is a composite image made from combining 19th-century Romantic landscape paintings with the latest images from NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. Langdon-Pole employs what he calls ‘ghost templates’ to focus our attention on how we comprehend images. Inspired by the figure–ground picture problems used in psychology, Langdon-Pole’s ‘ghost templates’ co-opt their confusion of subject so that viewers find themselves questioning what they are looking at, as well as how they perceive and understand the world.

– Natasha Conland, Senior Curator, Global Contempoary Art, 2023