SISI BOY
Schleifmühlgasse 1214 welcomes the Canadian artist Zachari Logan for the second time in the capital of Autria. Sisi Boy is an exhibition, interested in exploring aspects of Vienna that are not necessarily restricted to museums. This investigation is about a place itself seen through the eyes of a visitor, so is equally about the seer and the seen. Composite beings or characters, based on multiple affections the artist has come to feel, and experience first hand in Vienna, emerge in several ways. Combining drawing and threedimensional works, a dialogue evolves that further explores identity through a lens of the other.
Zachari Logan likes to involve in his work explorations of identity and selfawareness. Making use of his body in a catalyst way, the artist reinterprets in his drawings historical constructions through a contemporary lens. This is mainly established by utilising a combination of arthistoric techniques/motifs and through references to historic personages. Logan’s sumptuous art allows him to imagine alternate ways of existing, as well as proposing rotating histories.
The method of contextualizing and reinterpreting collections of art debuted during a residency in 2009, in Paris. By then the artist developed a project centered on the Neoclassical paintings of the prestigious Louvre, where he worked on small academicstyle drawings. His focus was mainly on the closeness of bodies within the larger compositions; the ways in which they touch, informing a sense of intimacy. From these smaller drawings titled Helping Hands Series, he constructed an epic scaled painting, titled Beautiful Losers have recourse to both a Neoclassical style and spatial realm. A similar project was develop at the Schleifmühlgasse 1214 in Vienna, based this time on a series of small drawings found on works discovered in both the Kunsthistorisches Museum and Albertina. For this project, a monument created using ceramic, is characterized by the artist’s experience of Vienna’s overwhelming romanticism regarding death, further by the ideas about the weight of melancholia and recollection. It is a crystallization of both the process of its production and its possible alteration through time, mainly as the result of the additional use of real flowers. The project casts doubt upon the touristic activity and its limitation regarding the life of a city, along with the restrictive quality nostalgia plays on the minds of individuals. Conjointly, a series of drawn selfportraits are developed, suggesting composites of the charismatic Vienna personage:
Sisi. The title of the exhibition “Sisi Boy” refers elegantly to the empress, but also plays with the term Sissy boy, which is a pejorative term for a boy or man who violates or does not meet the standard male gender role, which is in its turn a supplementary characteristic of the project. In this way, Logan suggests metaphors of an alternate reality through the reconstruction of this personality from the perspective of a foreign queer lens. In addition, an installation of his personal affects such as his hair, made into a wig resembling Sisi’s famous mane.
Text by Dora Dacosta
Workshop für Kinder zum Thema
Juni
Samstag, 14.6. 11-13.30
http://12-14\.org/2014-kinderworkshop/