She had lost all faith in relationships altogether. Some days she wonders if she will ever get back to being herself. It hasn’t been easy for her when her past seems to continue to haunt her over and over again. Finding it, in fact, is the point.Lacey Smith, a young brunette, has moved on and gotten back on her feet after an abusive relationship. But boxing up any art for specific function undermines the artist and the viewer both.
Art can offer solace and contemplation for those who seek it.
At the Museum of Fine Arts, “Philip Guston Now,” a much angsted-over exhibition that includes the artist’s gutsy take on the KKK, includes trigger warnings to keep those new to Guston from being caught unaware.īeing taken by the hand is not the same as being led by the nose. But really, is it up to the museum to tell you what these works should be for? The current cultural landscape is fraught with so much trauma, I don’t think it’s wrong to take viewers by the hand now and then. The forms are suggestive: Urns, traditionally, hold human remains a wreath is a funerary offering going back centuries. They’re like photo negatives of the vibrant pieces, a shadow world through the looking glass. The pieces themselves are a triumph one, an urn holding drooping floral fronds, and the other, a shimmering, silvery silhouette of a wreath enveloped in blackness, show the artist’s mastery of a new palette. Zachari Logan, "Urn (Moon Flowers)" Courtesy of Robert Klein Gallery Another worry came in a side gallery where two ghostly drawings - abandoning his love of color, Logan made these pieces entirely in shades of gray - were hung next to a pair of chairs installed for the express purpose of silent meditation. But amid a field of works so poetically oblique, I couldn’t help but wonder if a piece so literal was out of place here. The drawings are starkly gorgeous, each a bright burst of beauty and grief. Logan made them as tribute to the victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, where 49 people were killed in the deadliest attack on LGBTQ+ people in American history. “Remembrance” strays from its ambiguity with a grid of 49 little flower sketches in bright fuchsia. The tension between is what gives the piece life. The title suggests new growth, but the tone is more ominous than sunny. A hand gropes through the undergrowth, its fingertip buried in the soft, wet ground. 2,” 2022, floral vines creep near the shoreline of black water, colors vivid against the darkness. The best pieces here keep you off balance, searching for elusive meaning far more transcendent than tracks on a page. Logan’s skill is abundant enough that it could be distracting in a how-on-earth way, something he knows well enough to not rely on. Together and alone, the implied subject of both works is time - how nothing is static, all is fleeting, with beauty and upheaval entwined.
BEAUTIFUL TRAUMA TORRNET TORRENT
1,” 2020, its companion, is a view of the same torrent seen from flat on your back, flowers winging by beneath pale patches of cloud crowded by dark sky. 1,” 2020, feels playful, almost giddy, with wildflowers uprooted and whipped off the page by the breeze (Logan has drawn floral silhouettes right onto the gallery wall at the point of departure). “Remembrance” is at its best when it maintains its mystery and leaves itself open to broad reading. 3,” 2016, with a bolt of dark fabric wreathed in flowers, suggests a funereal shroud. Logan pays his respects to convention and adds his own flourish. The most vibrant living iteration is Mexico’s Day of the Dead, which is the furthest thing from morbid you can imagine it replaces mourning with a celebration of lives lived. It simply embodies the great inevitability of all life: that someday it ends, and there is beauty, even solace, in the churn of the natural order of things. Logan’s work is self-consciously a gentle form of memento mori, a medieval funerary motif - it translates to “remember that you will die” - that’s evolved over centuries to maintain its purity of purpose. Look closely, and you’ll see the picture collapsing in on itself - rot and decay knit into its vibrant fabric life entangled with death, no beginning or end. Eerily precise drawings of flowers glow on its dark surface, vividly hyperreal. The hanging is part of the work unbound, it feels in process, incomplete. “Dead Flowers,” 2021-22, is a broad sheet of black paper draped loose on the wall and curling to the floor. Logan’s pictures have an unsettling immediacy. Photography by Kathy Tarantola/© 2022 Peabody Essex Museum.
Zachari Logan, "Remembrance," exhibition documentation © 2022 Peabody Essex Museum.
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