Artists statement

In Frog B, Zac Langdon-Pole deconstructs and reweaves history by blending two vastly separate images into a single, cohesive collage. This intricate work merges a 2022 NASA James Webb Space Telescope photograph of the Tarantula Nebula with Johann Nepomuk Schödlberger’s 1830 Romantic landscape painting, Rocky Coast in Moonlight.

Using the the common interlocking structure of jigsaw puzzles, Langdon-Pole splices deep space imagery with 19th-century European romanticism. The result is a pixelated, hybrid tapestry where disparate eras and scales collide. The composition operates like a "Mooney image"- a cognitive science tool using stark dark and light tones to test how human perception fills in gaps based on prior knowledge. Through this assemblage, Frog B challenges our impulse to find absolute order, forcing us to confront how historical, scientific, and colonial frameworks shape our understanding of the universe.