July 12, 2023 – June 30, 2024
Joan Courtois Gallery. Stairwell
Included with admission. Free for Gardiner Friends.

Gallery and artist commission supported by the Thor E and Nicole Eaton Family Charitable Foundation

In this site-specific installation, artist Zachari Logan brings ceramics into the centre of his long-standing exploration of weeds, wildflowers, and ditches as avatars of queer male embodiment. Known for his exquisitely rendered drawings, Logan’s delicate plant forms evoke a ‘re-wilding’ of the body, where growth and fecundity arise out of material and form. Including the ditch as a liminal, queer space that thrives on the margins as well as individual, elaborately painted specimens, Logan transforms the physical body into an aspect of nature, resisting the containment of the vitrine.

The installation is on view across three levels of the Museum’s soaring stairwell gallery.

Artist Statement

Central to my work is the notion of the human body as land; a single, inseparable aspect of a much larger whole. My work engages notions of queer ‘re-wilding’, embodiment, memory, and mortality, often through the depicted geography of ‘ditches’; areas which are cultivated largely by the enforcement of their marginality. In Saskatchewan where I live, this is betwixt the road and farmer’s field.

Like the idiosyncratic ditch that survives despite its discarded flora and fauna—considered noxious, invasive, and undesirable—queer people and those “othered” by dominant social structures similarly exist in liminal spaces, both physically and emotionally in society. These parallels in language and topography catalyzed this body of work where drawing and sculpture reference the physical and metaphoric self to reflect on the queer body as a site of exploration and transformation. These particular floral species and the marginal spaces they inhabit stand in for queer bodies and spaces that resist monocultures.

Although displayed within the vitrines of the Joan Courtois Gallery, these works challenge containment. The compositions and the materials chosen—glazed and unglazed ceramic, paper elements, and my own hair, as either root or flowering systems—suggest an inexorable queer geography. They represent a flourishing edge that touches the eye to reveal queer existence as both beautiful and essential to understanding society and the world as a whole.