GALLERY
Flowers Bursting in the Bronx
Zachari Logan, Ross Bleckner team up for exhibition
BY NICHOLAS BOSTON
In 2012, the Canadian artist
Zachari Logan, who is
tall and has tattoos on both
arms, was curating a group
show, “Passages,” at the Daniel
Cooney Gallery in New York. One
day, Logan pressed the wrong button
in the elevator of the building
the gallery was in, only to make an
inspiring discovery.
“I came out of the elevator and
I saw, ‘Ross Bleckner Studio’ and
I just thought to myself, ‘Hmm…,’”
he said during a recent conversation
with Bleckner and curators of
“The Shadow of the Sun,” a serenely
beautiful exhibition pairing the
two artists, on show at the Glyndor
Gallery at Wave Hill in the Bronx
from May 22 to August 15.
Bleckner, the American abstract
painter whose rise to prominence
began in the 1980s with works
refl ecting on the AIDS crisis, had
been an infl uence on Logan since
Logan’s art-school days in Saskatchewan,
Canada’s centermost
Prairie, or Midwest, province.
Logan invited Bleckner to participate
in the group show he was
organizing, and Bleckner, long
intrigued by the place Logan was
coming from, accepted.
“Something about the whole
Saskatchewan thing always fascinated
me,” Bleckner said. “My love
of the idea of dramatic landscape.”
Thus began a series of collaborations
between the two artists, the
latest of which is “Shadow of the
Sun,” a conversation the curators
describe as “the omnipresence of
life and death through notions of
loss, decay, visibility/invisibility,
memory, fl ora, and landscape.”
Notably, Bleckner and Logan’s
conversation is one being had between
two gay-identifi ed artists
across careers, borders, infl uences,
generations, genres, and materialities,
producing a shared sensibility
and harmonious voice.
“Shadow of the Sun” features
both collaborative and individual
works of drawing, painting, and
sculpture, most with a fl oral motif.
There is also a “site-specifi c” drawing
Zachari Logan, “Fountain I”
Ross Bleckner and Zachari Logan, The New York Times Obituaries, No. 1 & No. 2 from the Collaborative Series, 2017, mixed media on mylar and paper.
of an arc of fl owers and weeds
Logan sketched directly onto one
wall that creeps from one side of
the gallery to the other. Symbolic
of the intersecting of the artists’
practices, the arc leads to a point
on the wall where a Bleckner painting
is hung, a pot of gold at the end
of the rainbow.
“When we discussed and decided
we would work on collaborations,
the next conversation, I think, was
COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS AND PAUL PETRO CONTEMPORARY ART, TORONTO
about what materials to use,”
Logan said. “And, I had mentioned
paper. Ross said he didn’t really
work on paper and then we excavated
his fi les and found hundreds
of incredible works on paper.”
They selected a series Bleckner
had created using obituaries from
the New York Times. “Since I’m a
teenager, I liked reading the obituaries,”
Bleckner said. “I like using
them in the Buddhist sense: that
WAVE HILL/STEFAN HAGEN
the refl ection and acknowledgement
of dying makes your life have
more meaning every day.”
On one of the pieces, Bleckner
overlaid the full broadsheet of one
obituary with refl ective mylar, “so
that when you’re looking at the
print, you’re actually looking at
yourself,” he said, and on another
it is totally black, meaning that to
➤ FLORAL, continued on p.60
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