Michael Zavros

Michael Zavros is one of Australia's most significant younger realist painters.


Michael Zavros (born, Brisbane, Australia, 1974) is an Australian painter who lives and works in Brisbane.

Zavros graduated from Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Visual Arts with a Double Major in Printmaking in 1996. He has worked a sessional lecturer in painting and printmaking. He is currently a Board Member of the Australia Council for the Arts, Visual Arts Craft Member Board.

In 2001 Michael Zavros was awarded the Australia Council Visual Arts/Craft Fund (VACF), Milan Residency and in 2005 the VACF Barcelona Residency in 2005. In 2003 he was awarded a Cite International des Arts Residency in Paris through the Power Institute, University of Sydney. In 2004 he was the recipient of a residency at the Gunnery Studios, Sydney, from the NSW Ministry for the Arts.

In 1999 he was the artist in residence at Redcliffe State High School, Redcliffe and All Saints Anglican School, Gold Coast.


Michael Zavros’ work is held in numerous private and public collections, including Artbank, [National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Collex, Kedumba Art Gallery, Queensland Art Gallery, University of Queensland Art Gallery, Tweed River Art Gallery, ABN AMRO, Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Grafton Regional Art Gallery and TMAG (Tasmanian Museum and Gallery).

Michael Zavros is represented by GRANTPIRRIE Sydney, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, and Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne.

Prizes and Awards


2010 Winner Doug Moran National Portrait Prize with Phoebe is dead/McQueen ,.
2009 Finalist Doug Moran National Portrait Prize
2007 Kedumba Drawing Award
2005 Robert Jacks Drawing Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria
2004 Primavera Collex Art Award, Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney
2002 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award.

In both 2002 and 2003 he was a finalist in the Brett Whiteley Travelling Arts Scholarship. In 2003 he was the recipient of an Arts Queensland Development Grant to support Everything I Wanted - Institute of Modern art.

© Michael Zavros

Jason Twiggy Lott

I collect, archive, categorize, reassemble, disassemble, reclaim, and repurpose the garbage trail of lives. Perhaps I’m more janitor and archaeologist than artist. I try to give discarded objects a new life. I reconstruct their history, purpose, and meaning. The artworks I create are shrines, reliquaries, totems, altars, love letters, journals, and collections of memories. They are products of their environment. They are pieced together from the detritus of the South where I was born, reside, and work. They are rich, dark, and dirty like the history of my home. The South is steeped in a history of dark personalities and deeds. Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil so he could play a mean guitar. We’ve ridiculed, oppressed, enslaved, and murdered people because we don’t like their skin color. White Southerners decided it was a good idea to go to war pretty much because we didn’t feel like working our own land. Our Archangel Elvis Presley died on his toilet a bloated, bejeweled drug addict, and our literary messiah, and arguably the greatest novelist in history, William Faulkner was by most accounts a rude, shut-in alcoholic. Yes, we have a sordid past colored with dark, tragic characters and bad behavior. But who doesn’t? Every nation, state, city, person has skeletons in their closet, but even today the South retains its spooky patina. We don’t progress at the same rate as the rest of our country. We move more slowly. Maybe it’s the heat. We haven’t fully covered our scars yet. We haven’t fully buried our skeletons. Our past remains relatively on the surface. Drive down any Mississippi back road and you’ll see it, feel it, and taste it. We tend to embrace our rich, colorful, and sordid history. We seem to have an innate sense of how our past, even the nasty bits, makes us who we are today. And so the rusted and weathered refuse of Southern life becomes my color palette. Like the uncannily insightful, intelligent, and soulful personalities disguised as backwoods simpletons that populate Faulkner’s stories, the refuse and trash I encounter every day masks great significance. A rusted beer bottle cap becomes a royal wax seal; a discarded and forgotten photograph becomes the centerpiece of a shrine, and a roofing nail found in a parking lot becomes a relic of Christ’s crucifixion. The average, the dirty, the discarded and forgotten can all be elevated to god-like status. Lead can be turned into gold. It’s all about perspective and how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. So much of the trash I find was once very significant to someone, but they lost it, discarded it, or forgot it. Does that negate its significance? Do we as people become less special if we’re lost or discarded? Does our past define us? Are we innately significant and special beings or is our significance dependent on how we’re remembered once we’re gone? Ultimately, my work speaks to our fundamental understanding of the human condition, as well as our lack thereof. What we leave behind can say as much about the present as it does about the past.

Jason Twiggy Lott

pp

Jason “Twiggy” Lott is a native Mississippi artist and graphic designer. Jason’s turn-ons are anatomical illustration, old engravings, old worn paper and photographs, discarded shopping lists, tattoos, shoes, and firearms.
Jason has been drawing, painting, assembling and generally creating full-time since childhood. Today, his fine art pursuits typically focus on found object assemblage, collage, and painting. “Assemblage and discarded objects have always fascinated me. I love the history behind objects and the stories they have to tell. More specifically, I like creating new stories for them.” His painting style tends to be as abstract as the paintings themselves, flowing organically and without forethought. “I try to paint from the heart, as cliché as that sounds. I try not to get in the way of what wants or needs to come out of me. In my art, there’s no such thing as an accident. In fact, I strive to create accidents.”


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© Jason Twiggy Lott

Dan Addington

In the last ten years, travels in Europe and Ireland have had a profound visual effect on my work. Upon returning from that first trip through Ireland, I began a series of paintings initially inspired by feelings and imagery experienced there. These influences were coupled with my own already established love of medieval and gothic forms, historical European religious subject matter, and Irish history. At this time I also began to aggressively explore the use of alternative, often organic materials like wax, tar, wood, and fabric to achieve a more elemental and tactile connection with the work. The exploration of ideas about memory, history, and the passage of time have become an important part of this process.

My paintings often include combinations of anatomical imagery, memorial sculpture, romantic symbolism, and religious iconography. The works are created using deep supports, like boxes, that stand out from the wall and assert themselves in the viewer's space. In many cases, the physical qualities of the work are meant to suggest the physical weightiness associated with monuments and memorial sculpture. Collaged materials, including heavy fabrics and printed matter, contribute to the initial surface of the work. After this weathered, heavily worked, abstract surface is established, it is sealed in a layer of beeswax, and the more figurative elements of the imagery are rendered in tar and varnish. The organic qualities of the wood, wax, and tar communicate a feeling of timelessness. I believe that the processes of building, weathering, eroding and layering are important to the work's identity -- it creates a history that can be traced, investigated, and experienced by the viewer. The materials and processes used emphasize the paintings as visceral objects with an evocative physical presence. Often, these materials are meant to recall and engage the physical body, and with the accompanying image, evoke a meditational response from the viewer. Through a mixed use of painterly languages, these works explore the nature of mortality, express a sense of loss, and address mankind's desire to locate spiritual meaning.

Dan Addington

Dan Addington has lived and worked in Chicago since 1992 after receiving his MFA in painting from Illinois State University in Bloomington/Normal. He received a BA with a double major in art and theater from Northwestern College in Orange City, IA, and a Masters in Art and Art History from Arkansas State University.

His work has been exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions across the US, and is represented by The Rymer Gallery in Nashville, Aliya|Linstrum Gallery in Atlanta, Malton Gallery in Cincinnati, and Oglvie/Pertl in Chicago. Since moving to Chicago, Dan's work has also been shown at Gwenda Jay Gallery, Struve Gallery, Carrie Secrist Gallery, Lineage Gallery, Evan Glasman Gallery, The Contemporary Art Workshop, The Greenview Art Center, The Arlington Heights Art Center, The Riverside Art Center, The Highland Park Art Center, The Evanston Art Center, the Loyola Medical Center, the Chicago Cultural Center, and Artchicago. Addington is the owner and director of Addington Gallery in Chicago.

Addington's paintings often include combinations of anatomical imagery, romantic symbolism, and religious iconography. The works are created using a variety of materials that emphasize the paintings as visceral objects with an evocative physical presence. often, these materials are meant to recall and engage the physical body, and with the accompanying image, evoke a meditational response from the viewer. Through a mixed use of painterly languages, these works explore the nature of mortality, express a sense of loss, and address mankind's desire to locate spiritual meaning.


Education


MFA, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 1990

MA, Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, AR 1987

BA, Theater/Art, Northwestern College, Orange City, IA 1985



Awards and Honors

Lilly Endowment grant, 2004
Third Place, 46th Spiva Annual, Spiva Center for the Arts, Joplin MO 1996
Elizabeth Stein Fine Arts Grant and Award, Illinois State University, Normal IL 1989
First Graduate Painting, Illinois State University Juried Exhibition, Normal IL 1989
Best of Show, Northwestern University All-Illinois Graduate Juried Exhibition, Evanston, IL 1989
Best of Show, Museum Guild Purchase Award, 41st Mid-States Biennial, Evansville Museum of Art, Evansville IN 1989
Nomination, Awards in the Visual Arts,Southeast Center for Contemporary Art 1987
Best of Show, Jonesboro Fine Arts Council Exhibition, Jonesboro AR 1986
Best of Show, Northwestern College Juried Exhibition, Orange City IA 1984, 1985

© Dan Addington

Melissa Tubbs

Architectural Ink

"Melissa B. Tubbs has been creating finely-detailed pen-and-ink drawings of architectural subjects for 17 years. Her work has been shown throughout the United States in juried competitions and museums. She created a three-dimensional Christmas ornament of a historical Alabama home for the official White House Christmas tree in 2001; an article about her work has been featured in American Artist magazine; and she was the recipient of an Eben Demarest Trust Grant through Mellon Bank of $14,000."

© Melissa Tubbs