PRESENTATION: Zachari Logan-Ghost Meadows
Zachari Logan is a Canadian visual artist working in drawing, ceramics and related installation practices. Logan is known internationally for his monumentally-scaled pastel drawings and intimate blue and red pencil drawings on Mylar depicting flora, wildlife and figures. Zachari Logan’s work intersects themes of selfhood, sexuality, queerness and memory with a focus on human relationships with the natural world
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo Remai Modern Archive
Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo and 15th century Unicorn Tapestries. One thing the pandemic has taught us is that there is a delicate interdependence in our relationships with others and our surroundings. Our routines, interactions with the environment, family and friends, leisure time — and time itself — have all been upended. We feel some things too much, while other things evade us. Zachari Logan’s most recent work delights in this shake up. Flowers and plant debris swirl against the backdrop of the sky. “Ghost Meadows”, Logan’s first major solo exhibition in his hometown of Saskatoon, continues the artist’s interest in the unkempt flora that persist and thrive in ditches and sidewalk cracks. In his exquisite drawings and hand-built ceramics, he refuses to differentiate between the wild and the cultivated, the strange and the familiar, immersing viewers in a field of beauty and desire that celebrates the natural world in all its forms. Logan has always seen nature and the body as both inextricably linked and interchangeable. The forms of flowers and foliage in his exquisite drawings can ‘stand in’ for the human body and for human emotions. In some of his works metamorphosis takes place, and the body changes into nature, and vice versa. However we are not talking about flower arrangements in a vase of carefully cultivated blooms. Zachari Logan is wild. The flowers and plants he is drawing have come up the hard way and have led interesting lives. Whatever humans have built, these plants have found a way through the concrete, finding and exploiting cracks to get to light and water, to thrive and grow. Whatever we do, we cannot hold these plants back.
Photo: Zachari Logan, Rococo Sky (guardai in alto e vidi le sue spalle) (detail), 2021, pastel, graphite, watercolour and coloured pencil on paper, 127 x 1372 cm. Courtesy of the artist
Info: Curator: Sandra Fraser, Remai Modern, 102 Spadina Crescent East, Saskatoon, Canada, Duration: 21/8/2021-9/1/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, Fri 10:00-21:00, https://remaimodern.org