Jason Twiggy Lott
Biography
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.”
Artist Statement
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.