28 artworks
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Zachari Logan

Overview

Canada

In June/July 2007, Zachari Logan had his first show with Craig Scott Gallery along with his colleague in the University of Saskatchewan MFA programme, David Folk. Logan's work in "Play Boys: A Two-Man Exhibition" was the subject of an article by Robert Enright in the highly respected Border Crossings magazine's special PAINT issue ("Grinning and Baring It”, Border Crossings, Issue no. 103, Border Views section). The following extract from Enright's article provides an entry point into Logan's work:

Logan is enamoured of the possibilities of projecting fictional identities from any number of sources and, invariably, the image he conjures in his imagination is eroticized. Texts as different as Orlando, Gulliver’s Travel and the Bible have been generative in this regard. In Gulliver, 2005, he reconfigures the relationship between the Lilliputians and the eponymous hero of Swift’s satire. “The idea of the Lilliputians crawling all over him and tying him down created this instant homoerotic image in my head,” Logan says, just as the image of the Biblical Lazarus carried a sexual charge that he elaborated in a series called the “Lazarus Drawings.” Their manner can be more lyric (part Ingres and part Hockney), even though they began in the problematic territory of eroticized suicide bombers. Logan is aware of the specific history of gay representation in the larger generalized history of art, and he mixes the two traditions at will. One of his painted portraits, Wrong Team , 2007, came out of his interest in the way that Monet composed The Fifer, 1866. “I was interested in the stance and how simplistic and sophisticated that space was.” But Logan’s self-rendering is intentionally ambiguous. He undercuts the clarity of Manet’s figure and makes his own image a collection of misdirections; one eye is obscured, the back is arched in a weird way, his shoelaces are untied and, most significantly, he has no pants. Whatever dignity he may have had as a batter will evaporate as soon as he moves. “I’m interested in underlying themes of bravado and heroism,” he says, “but their interest comes through the creation of a self-anxious Queer narrative.”

Logan recently graduated with his MFA (Distinction) from the University of Saskatchewan, and was honoured with the University's Best Thesis Prize (Humanities and Fine Arts). Logan then became the only Canadian winner of the inaugural MFA Now Painting Competition, which received over 350 submissions form art schools and faculties around the world; 20 winners were jury-selected, and two of Logan's paintings ("Extension" and "In and Out No 1") were displayed in the MFA Now prize-winners' exhibition in Miami at Praxis Gallery in June 2009; Judy Chicago is patron of the MFA Now competition. A number of self-portrait drawings produced by Logan over the past year were exhibited in a solo show, The Myth of Pants, in Paris at Galerie Jeanroch Dard in January 2009. A subsequent group show at Galerie Jeanroch Dard included a collaboration between Logan and iconic French artist, Sophie Calle. Since the start of 2009,he has also exhibited four times in New York, including a solo exhibition at Envoy Gallery and, in 2010, Pulse Art Fair. In the first half of 2010, his shows include solo exhibitions in Montreal and Ottawa and a show in Berlin.

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Logan has written about his work in the following terms:

My work explores and critiques constructions of masculinity, queerness and marginalization in the contemporary world. In both my graphic work and my painting, I confront the notion that masculinity is homogenous and question heteronormative sexuality as the origin by which all other male sexual realities are judged. Recently my painting has become more literally autobiographical, in the sense that I am exploring my own image as subject matter. While I am still analyzing constructions of masculinity through the exploration of archetypal male identities, I am performing a sort of drag by impersonating these identities using a semblance of my own image and costuming.

The staged backdrops, which contain these performances both minimalistic and bordering on tableau, further reference the constructed nature of sexuality and identity. While my drawings continue the same types of exploration into masculinity with the use of constructed images and elaborate backdrops, they are more allegorical in nature. Visually, I am interested in Neo-Classical and Baroque spatial realms. In my work I mimic these styles referencing art-historical masculine portrayals, such as: male bravado, narcissism and heroism. I then undermine these very constructions by returning the instinctually heterosexist gaze with a self-anxious queer narrative.

His work has been the subject of a growing number of commentaries and profiles: click on Reviews at the top of this page [the Reviews are in the process of being updated].