The Moon Swept Down

To view individual artwork and installation images of the exhibition, please visit here.


Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to present new work by Zachari Logan.

From Zachari, November 2025:

The title of this exhibition, The Moon Swept Down, a line taken from Joni Mitchell's song For the Roses, sets a stage where the cloak of moonlight contours ever-shifting notions of identity, place and the nature of memory. This exhibition includes new monumental and intimate drawings, paintings, and installation that centre around figuration and landscape. These works continue my long-standing exploration of selfhood and queerness through notions of interconnection.

The title of the largest work in this exhibition, Diana, refers to Diana, the Greek goddess of the hunt as well as the moon. I portray her as a self-representation within a vast landscape, placing viewers in a vantage point deep in lakeside water. A similar vantage as Actaeon, a young hunter who unwittingly stumbles across Diana, witnessing her bathing without invitation. For his voyeurism, Diana curses him, transforming him into a deer and his own hunting dogs tear him apart. My Diana is perhaps less menacing, not pictured here bathing - but back on land (maybe aware of visitors), but from the shore where we see her, we the viewers are immersed. We are perhaps the bathers.

As in past works of mine that engage self-portraiture, my body and its visage becomes an embodiment of nature, a character that bridges a gap between contemporary queer representation and art historical languages that have attempted to erase or effectively exclude the reality of queerness in nature and thus society. The landscape foliage here is entirely generated by recollection of botanical forms. Waterweeds, trees, rock and grasses here are all composite forms that have been drawn through a process of reminiscence. Drawn entirely from memory of past experiences either drawing from life, image or a combination of both. The landscape is entirely fictive and also entirely authentic, as it comes from my experience of nature, of land and of self. The drawing in it’s totality becomes self, both the landscape and the figure. The water is the South Saskatchewan, the Danube, Lake Ontario and Wascana Lake. Like in most works in this exhibition, the moon is present, but here only as light source- and a subtle reflection on the waters edge.


Notes on the paintings in The Moon Swept Down:

The paintings in this exhibition range in scale from miniature to bordering on the monumental, but all follow the same visual language and attention to detail and minutiae as the drawings in chalk pastel. The body and plant life are in conversation. Land and queer embodiment are central to the reiteration of mythological scenes/themes and personages (Jupiter & Io, Persephone & Hades, Diana & Actaeon)… ideas of regeneration, decay and balance are explored through compositional experimentation, heightened in works such as Wheel, Three Moons, Trilliums at Midnight and Jupiter & Io (Triptych).

Wheel, like the drawings from Pool Series (After Mary Delany) is an unconventional still life. In the painting Wheel, fresh wildflowers with root systems exposed press inward directionally against a snaking accumulation of dead/dry wildflowers that seem to be separated or bordered by a long circular chain necklace. The direction of this composition is neither up or down but inward/outward. The composition looks clock-like and the chain references a timeline, but not in a linear sense, it can also be a stand in for a body; perhaps an adornment of Persephone.
-- Zachari Logan, 22 November 2025



Canadian artist Zachari Logan works mainly with large-scale drawing, ceramics and installation practices, evolving a visual language that explores the intersections between identity, memory and place. Employing a strategy of visual quotation, mined from place and experience, Logan re-wilds his body as a queer embodiment of nature, engaging ideas of beauty, mortality, empirical explorations of landscape, and overlapping art-historic motifs that underline a fundamental interconnection of the human as nature. Logan has exhibited widely throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Logan’s work can be found in many private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Remai Modern, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Gardiner Museum, Peabody Essex Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, 21cMuseums Hotel Collection and Fondazione Thetis, and corporate collections including RBC and Scotiabank.

As an extension of his studio practice, Logan has attended many residencies; including Vienna's Museums Quartier MQ21 Program, the International Studio & Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, Wave Hill Botanical Gardens Winter Workspace Program in the Bronx and Little Bird Artist Residency in rural Bulgaria. Logan was artist in residence at the Tom Thomson Shack at the McMichael Gallery in 2017, a commission of the Ontario Government to commemorate the centenary of Tom Thomson’s death. In 2021 Logan was the Koerner Artist in Residence at Queens University. Logan has worked collaboratively with several celebrated artists, including Ross Bleckner and Sophie Calle and his work has been featured in many publications worldwide, including BBC Culture, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Border Crossings, and Hyperallergic to name a few. In September 2025 Logan opened Human Landscapes at Fondazione Marchesani in Venice, Italy. Logan was the 2025 artist in residence at the Kenojuak Cultural Centre and Print Shop in Kinngait Nunavut on the invitation of the West Baffin Cooperative in October, Logan’s second book of poetry, Green, was released through Radiant Press in June 2025.