boyish as a birch tree
Logan MacDonald
To rub is to come into contact, to create friction between, to move against the world we encounter. We rub against our families, our histories, our locations, and ourselves, offering brief glimpses into the relationships we have with the world around us. In boyish as a birch tree, Logan MacDonald employs rubbing to explore identity, familial relationships, landscape, memory, and Queerness.
When bison were reintroduced to the prairies, they visited the same sites as their ancestors. They rub against the same stones, enacting an intergenerational bodily memory. Logan references this phenomenon, intentionally drawing cross-generational connections by including his father’s woodcarvings in the exhibition. His own use of woodcarving repeats his father’s processes and forms, honouring a family tradition, and drawing on shared memory.
Where do these memories live?
The history of heraldry, which utilizes symbolic imagery to identify families and institutions through coats of arms, and to accompany official proclamations, has institutionalized memory and meaning through the proliferation of this state-sanctioned imagery. boyish as a birch tree engages this visual tradition, borrowing forms and recontextualizing signs and symbols to investigate the tradition and propose new ways of understanding. If we know a coat of arms refers to a specific people and place, what can it refer to when its symbols are disrupted, dismantled, or recontextualized? In two savages (study of a queer crest) Logan makes a reference to Newfoundland’s coat of arms, substituting the two Beothuk figures featured in the imagery for hunky Caucasian men. This recontextualizing shifts the power-dynamic within the imagery, inviting us to consider racial dynamics, objectification, and institutional memory.
What are we allowed to remember?
Referencing mid-century athletic models, a tradition that both visualized expectations of middle-class masculinity and functioned as a groundwork for subversive gay visual culture, Logan exposes the contradictory influence of imagery and culture on identity. Leaning into this complicated understanding of visual culture, boyish as a birch tree is never one thing at a time, but a shifting pastiche, full of nuance and contradictions.
Can we hold a single identity in isolation?
In Logan’s video self-portrait, we see depictions of him throughout his life. We see an infant, a teenager, a young adult, and adult portrayals. These versions of himself are overlayed, overlapped, and spliced together with other family footage and landscapes. The result is the complicated view of a self; a recognition that our identities are a combination of all our past experiences.
boyish as a birch tree poses viewers with the question of how memory, signs, and symbols contribute to identity and encourages us to consider the messy and complicated ways we individually and collectively identify with the world around us.
Logan MacDonald (b. 1979, Summerside P.E.I.) is a queer gay Canadian visual artist, curator, writer, educator and activist who focuses on queer, disability and Indigenous perspectives. He is of mixed-European and Mi’kmaw ancestry, who identifies with both his Indigenous and settler roots. Born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, his Mi’kmaw ancestry is connected to Elmastukwek, Ktaqamkuk. His artwork has exhibited across North America, notably with exhibitions at L.A.C.E. (Los Angeles), John Connelly Presents (New York), Ace Art Inc. (Winnipeg), The Rooms (St. John’s), and Articule (Montréal). His work has been published in Canadian Art, C Magazine, and more. In 2019, MacDonald was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award and was honoured with a six-month residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. He is a graduate of Concordia University with a BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies and a MFA in Studio Arts from York University. MacDonald is an Associate Professor in Studio Arts at the University of Waterloo.