Zab Shavrick is a Portland-based multimedia artist, illustrator and designer. They spend their week painting, working as a studio assistant at Outlet PDX, and crafting brand identities for small businesses around town. On the weekends you can find them collecting the shapes of fascinating chairs, searching for the best bagel in town, perfecting their tuna melt recipe and occasionally tattooing. Zab relishes in the color green and its many shades, the endless possibilities of material exploration and the joy in the details of everyday found objects.

Artist Statement

Zab’s process often involves translating work across media; scanning watercolors, found materials and plant matter and manipulating their colorways in a collage-like process, resulting in soft spoken Risograph prints. 

Zab’s work plays with the motif of a slightly skewed reality; taking everyday objects, moments, and people around them and stretching their corners ever so slightly, teetering into abstraction. They inhabit a frightful memory and a delayed ability to process information around them – often focusing on the colors, textures and senses of a moment, rather than the context. A bit maddening and also maybe a bit nice, but it generally depends on the day. I guess you could call them a visually unreliable narrator. 

After six years of exploration, play and conversing with Riso machines, they see Risograph as a tool that captures time, the possibility of change and a friend that speaks its own bright and unpredictable language.