Melanie Rolfes & Michael Zavison

Melanie Rolfes and Michael Zavison are a collaborative duo whose individual artistic trajectories intersected at the Atlanta Midtown Festival of the Arts in 2010. Describing an almost immediate creative connection, Melanie and Michael realized that not only did their artistic interests line up, but that the work they each did individually could be stronger when paired together.

Michael Zavison moved from interior and set design through a job at Marshal Field & Company in his home city of Chicago into fine art. His evolution as an artist has always been balanced against the need to problem solve and create lasting solutions for clients and collectors.

Melanie Rolfes grew up in Europe and that experience continues to influence her stylistic and color choices, her desire to distill emotions by way of color.

Michael’s immersive abstractions met Melanie’s color-infused European sensibilities. While she creates as a way to channel and direct energies and thoughts—making works that are both focal points as well as imaginary passages, he uses industrial materials to create archival works that transform spaces. In many ways what they both do is take the fleeting moments of beauty created by time (like the patina on old plaster walls, or the accumulated rust of decades) make it stable, deliberate, and manageable…which is to say: theirs is a process of creation, not neglect or decay.