Zachari Logan (b.1980)

Zachari Logan has become one of Regina’s most successful artists working in ceramics, drawing, and installation. Exploring the intersections between masculinity, identity, memory, and place, he has been widely exhibited in group and solo exhibitions throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. One of his outstanding early works is Eunuch Tapestry 5, executed in chalk pastel on eight large sheets of black paper. It was inspired by the floral landscape of The Unicorn Tapestries, 1495–1505, housed in The Cloisters in New York, and the illustrations of botanical specimens by Mary Delany (1700–1788), which Logan viewed in the British Museum.

Logan’s work, including various series of intimate blue and red pencil drawings on Mylar depicting flora, fauna, and figures, mainly focuses on his queer identity and social constructs of gender. In 2015, he produced a series of finely rendered blue drawings of weeds and wildflowers from Saskatchewan ditches, the plants and the liminal space of the ditch serving as a metaphor for queer bodies and spaces that exist on the margins. Commenting on the series, Logan later wrote: “I started to think about the landscape of Saskatchewan as a marginal space, to begin with, but also seeking out spaces where I could reclaim a sense of queer space or queer embodiment, and I started thinking about the ditches that line the sides of the roads, in part because of my interest in weeds.”  Logan expanded on the theme in his later Wildman series, in which he “re-wilds” his body as a queer embodiment of nature.

Logan moved to Regina in 2015 after completing a master of fine arts degree at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. He has continued to live in the city despite its isolation from other major art centres, which has not held him back. Recognized through awards and accolades in Saskatchewan and nationally, Logan continues to garner international attention. In 2018, he collaborated with renowned New York artist Ross Bleckner (b.1949) in the exhibition The Shadow of the Sun, held at the College Art Galleries at the University of Saskatchewan, both artists focusing on themes of nature and transcendence. Following its Saskatoon showing, the exhibition moved to the Wave Hill botanical gardens and cultural centre in the Bronx, New York.

In 2023, Logan was featured in a major solo exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Called Remembrance, the show explored the themes of death and rebirth through large-scale drawings, some applied directly to the walls, and sculptures. Among the works shown was a study of the cycle of life called Dead Flowers No. 2, 2022.