I Like to Disrupt Convention: A Conversation Between Zachari Logan and Joseph R. Wolin

 Installation, All of My Little Landscapes, Clamp Art, NYC. Sept. 2024.

 

By JOSEPH R. WOLIN October 22, 2024

Joseph R. Wolin: Your new exhibition at CLAMP, All of My Little Landscapes, features paintings and drawings that depict the male body and nature—plants and animals limned with a Pre-Raphaelite intensity of detail and differentiation. As viewers, we are led to assume that each species is an identifiable one based on copious observation or reliance on botanical illustration. Yet I have also seen you draw similar compositions directly on walls without any apparent recourse to references. Can you describe your working process for the works in the show? Do you look at actual flora and fauna or their representations in the studio? Are the plants and animals meant to be recognizable varieties? How big a part does the imaginary play?

Zachari Logan: I have several strategies related to how I record, evoke, and utilize subject matter. In recent years, my use of flora has expanded exponentially. This is due to an importance I have put on ideas of interconnection and what I call “queer rewilding.” My understanding of the world does not embrace a separation between the human body and the land. In other words, I understand myself to be an inseparable aspect of a much larger whole, a consequence or result of landscape. I am interested greatly in simple empirical observations of the natural world, gathered via walking, watching, and collecting; these actions yield a great deal of visual material for me. Because of my discernment about land and body, I often interpret my encounters of the world though reminiscence. This reimagining or reinterpretation of visual information is approximate. My depictions of flora become mindscapes—imprecise biologically, but accurate or true as enchantments and as self-portraits. 

 Transformations, No. 5 (The Dream), acrylic on wood panel, 5x7 inches, 2024.

I draw directly on gallery walls without visual sources as a sort of incantation. I call that particular series Nomenclatures, because each one is its own taxonomy of me, of my mind and body’s movement on the day it was created, “conjured” by the recalling of flora I have drawn for many years. I began making these large wall drawings for exhibitions that were mounted during the pandemic as a reference to time and an acknowledgement of our own fragility and mortality. One day we are here, the next we are not. After each exhibition the drawings are sanded, erased, and only traces are left to haunt the gallery walls under layers of paint. They have a slight physical afterlife, perhaps, but are gone to the naked eye.

That is not to say that I no longer use photographic source material, still-life references in the studio or outdoors, from time to time. I engage these strategies when the work’s conception calls for it. All these modes of reference are engaged in different works or series in All of My Little Landscapes.

Secret Garden Series, No. 2, Briefs, ink on cotton, 12x15 inches, 2024.

My use of plant-life referred to as “weeds” is still a very relevant language of subjectivity for me. These botanicals, often populating marginal areas—pushed out of the way of either farming monocultures or the manicured gardening found in suburbs and other intensely urban settings—become stand-ins for the queer body, for those who feel othered, set aside. Their use is both celebratory and suggestive. Why is a weed a weed? Because it has no purpose for human consumption, but it still has a very real reason for surviving and thriving.

Regarding my use of fauna, specifically as it relates to this exhibition, the animals that populate the works are mostly moths and birds. The moths, featured in the Transformations series, symbolize just that, transformation, rebirth, or regeneration, and, I suppose, the nocturnal world. The birds that cover my body in the Saint Francis-esque drawing, The Feeding 5 (from Wildman Series), evoke a reversal of care or stewardship, an imagining of birds feeding me, rather than the more usual me feeding the birds, as one might do at a park—shifting one’s body in relation to the world as it is.

 Installation, Spectre No. 1, Dead Flowers, pastel on black paper, 50 x 80 inches, 2022.

Installation, All of My Little Landscapes, Clamp Art, NYC. Sept. 2024.

Hive No. 5, Dandelion Root, (from Wildman Series), blue pencil on mylar, 9x12 inches, 2023.

JRW: Might we think of your work as exploring a “land-body problem,” as opposed to the classic mind-body problem? If so, then we can see your recent drawings on old clothing, on the garments worn closest to your skin, as a symbolic garbing of oneself in nature, in the natural world. But still the question remains: why blue?

ZL: Yes, I think that would be a really good way to put it. The garments are definitely a symbolic garbing, while at the same time they are a physical document of my body, and that of my husband (due to the sharing of some of the items). So, the act of “drawing” began years ago as our bodies interacted with the clothing, altering it materially, and continued in a different manner thorough the ink adornments of dense flora. For me, monochromatic drawings that utilize a color (usually, either red or blue, rather than black or grey, i.e., graphite) possess an emotional register that heightens the image in terms of mood. The use of blue in these drawings, as well as in my Mylar works, relates to its visual associations with both melancholy and magic.

JRW: While the male body appears embedded in nature, or morphing into it, in your drawings and paintings, it does not read as imperatively homoerotic. And references to the female, rather more coded, appear as well, from certain flowers and fruits themselves to the rather suggestive slivers of exquisitely glinting metallic in your recent Gold Leaf, Nocturne panels. What is the queer part of “queer rewilding”? Do you relate the exponentially increasing crisis of nature in some way to the ongoing struggle for queer rights? 

ZL: I agree; there is sensuousness but no overt sexualization or homoeroticism in these works. I feel that suggestiveness is a more effective or richer experience of the still image when working to queer gendered tropes or styles from art history.

I would claim that queerness is nature; that is the rewilding. And yes, the crisis of nature overwhelmingly reveals other struggles related to human rights, including queer rights. I work to visualize this rewilding—the queer as natural—through the subversion of coded gender norms, the depiction of interconnecting human and botanical forms [e.g., the penis as a rooted outgrowth of dandelion in Hive No. 5, Dandelion Root, (from Wildman Series)] and the use of my own memory to recall naturally occurring forms in the depiction of irreal ones (the Fantasy Flower painting and Gold Leaf, Nocturnes).

Lastly, while Spectre No. 1, Dead Flowers, pictures a male body, the art-historical reference is a woman, Elizabeth Siddal, the famed red-headed muse of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose brush with death at the bottom of a freezing tub of water aided in creating one of the most recognizable images in art history (John Everett Millais’s 1851–52 Ophelia), further galvanizing the female body as passive landscape to “inhabit.” In Spectre, my own body sinks, or rather hovers, on a sheet of paper with rounded edges, a male still-life taking on the role of both artist and model, active and passive, alive and (possibly) dead. 

 Installation, All of My Little Landscapes, Clamp Art, NYC. Sept. 2024.

JRW: Speaking of returns from the dead, while you are well known for your drawings and pastels, and also for sculptural works and installations, your current exhibition intersperses works on paper and articles of clothing with acrylic paintings on panel. Yet the panels are uniformly smaller than the other works, and in series, while the works on paper are all uniquely sized and singly hung. You seem to have coded the paintings as “minor,” possibly, in comparison to the “major” drawings. What brought you to, or back to, painting at this moment and how do you see it in relation to the rest of your work?

ZL: It could be said that I like to disrupt convention. We have discussed this in relation to my content, but it is also true of my materials. My recent paintings, most of which are miniature in scale, are not, for me, minor, but they do play with viewers’ expectations. Painting is, more often than not, on a heroic scale. This is not a contemporary phenomenon, but it certainly applies now. The hierarchical relationship these two practices—painting and drawing—historically have held is one of preparation—drawing—and of execution—painting. Drawing is thought of as foundational, but rarely before our contemporary moment has drawing taken on its own life as a fully formed practice in and of and for itself. I consciously play with these associations. Drawings in this show range from medium-sized to monumental. In the case of the Secret Garden drawings, in ink on old clothing, there are moments of looser line-work. This, coupled with their fabric support, creates a rupture, a link back to painting. Compositionally, the paintings are tiny, dense, and contain the body in ways that drawings have historically done. Neither are preparation for the other, both simply exist beside one another here in conversation.

The title of this exhibition is a nod to the formal and material play in which I engage. It is taken from one of my favorite songs, “Turbulent Indigo” by Joni Mitchell. Essentially, the song is a reflection on the life and afterlife of the work of Van Gogh, as well as Mitchell’s own struggles with expression. It beautifully commiserates with the desire to explore and express states of mind, land, and body to the observer:

"I'm a burning hearth" he said

"People see the smoke

But no one wants to warm themselves

Sloughing off a coat

And all my little landscapes

All my yellow afternoons

Stack up around this vacancy

Like dirty cups and spoons

No mercy Sweet Jesus!

No mercy from Turbulent Indigo"

This conversation was conducted by e-mail between October 6 and October 15, 2024.

* All images courtesy of the artist and Clamp Art.