AN ART ESSAY
ZACHARI LOGAN is interviewed by VANESSA PATEL about his art, the influences that have informed his approach, the relationship between the human body and the land, and the beauty of slowing down and contemplating the world at a different pace.
Q: Hello Zachari, thank you for your time. I noticed that your exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum is in a space dedicated to contemplation and meditation.
ZL: Yes, a lot of my work is a mixture of figuration and landscape. My belief surrounding the body and land is that they are one and the same. I have a desire to slow the viewers down, because we interact with so many media that speed up our brains, and don’t always foster contemplation or critical thinking.
Recently I was in New York and saw the Hans Holbein exhibition at the Morgan Library. I was in the room with people who were just quietly staring at objects for ten minutes or longer. Sharing moments within that type of space is phenomenal because our brains work in a different way.
Q: Yes, instead of being bombarded constantly, something emerges from within. The work you are showing right now at the Peabody, “Remembrance,” is a lot about life and death.
ZL: I gravitate to the contemplation of my own mortality in my work. The Jurrien Timmer Gallery at the Peabody is a space of contemplation, which gave me a great opportunity to do some new works that had a specific focus on the past couple of years. Some were done in immediate response to the pandemic, and later became a conversation that touched on our perception of time, the contemplation of loss, and the remarkable change and potential as we’re emerging from what ever this is.
Q: I have been enjoying your nature drawings, and also some of your pen and ink drawings. They have such an old-world feel, the detailing is beautiful, and the visualization process is almost like contemplation for you. What has informed your work?
ZL: The art historical reference point was really important. For example, I worked on a series of very large self-portraits, referencing the scale and the construction of the neoclassicists. I’d been thinking about figuration of the male body, so I started with my own body, while making references to historical tropes and styles. In 2009 I had an exhibition in Paris, and it was the first time I’d seen a lot of the historical work I was referencing; works like The Raft of Medusa, and the paintings of David and Delacroix. I’ve made it a part of my practice to do residencies, and to do research and work from collections. It’s how I’ve come across most of the works that are referenced in my visual language.
My body is always the catalyst. Regardless of whether or not it is visually present, I think about things in relation to my body, which I address in terms of mortality.
Also, I see no separation between our bodies and the land. What we do to ourselves, we do to the land, and vice versa. So, with something like the pandemic, it probably happened because of encroachment in places that we don’t need to be. In a lot of ways, I think it comes down to human greed.
Another big influence was my upbringing in an isolated area of Canada as a Roman Catholic. A lot of Western art is linked to the Catholic narrative, with male bodies in different forms of torture and transcendence. A lot of 20th century Canadian art was very British or European, transposed to a North American context, and that was what I knew.
Q: This is what informed you, and along the way you have discovered new things. At the Peabody, part of your work has been making murals. How was that?
ZL: I had a lot of time to think and rethink projects during the pandemic. I wanted to do work that would disappear after an exhibition, just sink into the wall. The mural artworks are literally sanded down (they’re graphite drawings) and painted over. Traces of them will always remain in the wall, which is a lovely notion. I call them Nomenclature 1, 2, 3, and 4, and I definitely wanted to do one for this exhibition. It’s simply a gesture about time, about how we’re here then we’re not.
Q: Coming to your installations, you made one in porcelain and encouraged people to touch it. That is very unusual for an artist in a public space.
ZL: People have a desire to touch things. They get to be in dialogue with the artist, to experience the same thing, even in a slight way. One of the aspects that personally drew me to ceramics, and the specific clay that I work with, is the feel of it. It almost feels like bone, and the color looks like bone matter. Again, it all comes back to the body. “Fountain 1” is really like a pile of bones. Every time I show it, there are more flowers. It changes with every installation.
The Fountain installation came out of seeing how monuments were changed by human interaction, and how they changed each person who visited them. The first monument I visited was the grave of Oscar Wilde, which is in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. It was a very cold wintry day, and there were brown, green, and red mosses on everything. As I approached the grave, I thought it was covered with red moss, but as I got closer I realized it was lipstick. People had been kissing the grave. I thought, “What a beautiful, beautiful thing. This monument has been changed in a subtle but physical way.” It really affected me.
I had another experience in Vienna at the Stephansdom, the city cathedral. As you walk through the door, you’re invited to touch a small piece of limestone. There’s a hand imprint in the limestone from people having touched the stone in the same spot for 900 years. That continual very simple gesture over time created a beautiful impact.
My thinking about a monument isn’t that you visit it once, but that you visit it at different times in your life. You’re always changing, so you’re going to have a different experience each time.
Q: So far you’ve explored painting, ceramics, murals, installations, illustrations, poetry. What’s next, Zachari?
ZL: I’m not sure. I have a few projects coming up, and the expansive space of my new studio will definitely affect what I do. We’ll see what happens.
Q: It’s been lovely chatting with you.
ZL: I thank you so much.
Artworks by ZACHARI LOGAN
Zachari Logan
