For a special edition of Art on James, we teamed up with our most creative neighbours, the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) to present Chimera, a large-scale artwork by Zac Langdon-Pole.

For one day only, Langdon-Pole’s behemoth artwork towered over the very centre of James St for the James St Food + Wine Trail Market Day event on Sunday 28 July.

Reclaiming the intersection of James, Robertson and Doggett Street’s, Langdon-Pole created a surreal hybrid monument in the form of an artwork featuring a bronze-replica Camarasaurus skull mounted on a spider crane.

Chimera contemplates history, fact, fiction, archetypes, truth, part-truths, progress, monsters and the malleability of history.

During the late-nineteenth century, US palaeontologists discovered a massive skeleton of a species they went on to name the Brontosaurus, meaning ‘noble thunder lizard’. It was assembled at the American Museum of Natural History, becoming famous as the first full dinosaur skeleton to be placed on public display. However, it wasn’t one dinosaur, but a hybrid of two species: the body of an Apatosaurus, and the head of a Camarasaurus.

Despite this, today, ‘the Brontosaurus’ remains an archetype in the collective conscious of the world – it exists in the minds of the masses even though in reality it never truly existed.

Intrigued by this story of miscategorisation and the disordering of scientific knowledge, Langdon-Pole’s Chimera investigates how fact and fiction co-exist in most things, ‘The Brontosaurus was one of the first avatars of the modern age. Like ourselves, it has one foot in fact and one in fiction. Chimera is an ode to two related yet divergent stories: the deep time of the Earth and the “progress” of human civilisation, where cranes fuelled by fossils dominate our skylines.’

In Jungian psychology, archetypes are a concept that refers to a universal, inherited idea, or image that is present in the collective unconscious of all human beings. Chimera named for the fire-breathing ancient Greek monster composed on different animal parts, is modern imagining of the monster, using the already imaginary Brontosaurus as a starting point to interrogate, “when does one thing become another?”

ZAC LANGDON-POLE
Zac Langdon-Pole (b.1988) lives in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In 2010, he gained his BFA from Elam School of Fine Arts, and, in 2015, his Meisterschüler from Städelschule, Frankfurt. His work incorporates found and fabricated artefacts, and spans scales of time and space human and inhuman, to explore memory, translation, and the ordering of cultural and natural worlds. In 2017, he won the Ars Viva Prize, and, in 2018, the BMW Art Journey. He has exhibited widely internationally. In 2020, City Gallery Wellington presented his major survey show, Containing Multitudes. In 2022, he was a McCahon House Artist in Residence at Parehuia , Titirangi. Later this year, his work will feature in the Asia Pacific Triennial at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. He is represented by Station Gallery in Warrane/Sydney and Naarm/Melbourne, and by Michael Lett in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

IMA
Founded in 1975, Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art is Australia’s oldest independent contemporary art gallery and a hub for art life in Queensland. It champions art and artists and creates a space to explore ideas, connecting local voices to global dialogues.

ART ON JAMES
Since 2011, James St has explored the intersection of art and commerce via its Art on James platform. Art on James offers the James Street community opportunities to enjoy works outside the gallery, on the street and in retail spaces. To date, it has featured works by Ben Quilty, Richard Bell, Vernon Ah Kee, Helga Groves, Pope Alice, Jonathan Zawada, Jon Cattapan, Gerwyn Davies, Sam Cranstoun, Dale Harding, Sebastian Moody, Jemima Wyman, Ghost Patrol, and Ross Manning, and now Zac Langdon-Pole. James St thanks IMA and Hutchinson Builders for their support.