Well-known for his graphic style, artist Nat Russell creates designs that are equally at home on a skateboard deck as they are in an art gallery. Home interior paint and spray paint are tamed within linear dimensions on large-scale wood panels, pairing with the other three and four-foot panels that feature wheat-pasted posters. A series of smaller-scale pieces are risographs, printed at local Indianapolis shop Cat Head Press. Together, they read as a zine of the past year, full of cheeky contemplations of depth and nostalgia and acting as prompts for a meditation on purposeful absent-mindedness and the strangeness of complicated feelings.

Actual Stillness. House paint, spray paint on wood panel. 49" x 47" x 2"

Though it could rest in a magazine on your coffee table, the large-scale format allows for Russell’s thoughts to take up real, physical space. Consider “Actual Stillness.” The cotton candy pink absorbs whatever flurry of emotions you step in front of the painting with and exchanges a lighthearted breath of childlike pause. There may be a degree of optimism woven throughout the exhibit, but Russell twists it into the crevices of phrases reminiscent of corporate emails and the anxious thoughts that come rushing in right when you lay down to sleep.

Memory Ghost. Photocopy, wheat paste on wood panel. 36" x 29" x 2"

“Memory Ghost” features a cartoonish phantom that pops up again in “Have You Felt It Ghost Thing.” The drawing initially came from a monthly magazine column Russell writes/illustrates in the Smudge. In the style of advertisements found in the back of old comic books, the memory ghost is available for order but comes flooding into your mind before you’ve chosen to purchase.

While those illogical spirals of nighttime anxiety can bring with them panic and sleeplessness, Russell transforms the scary into the silly. This is a recurring tactic in his art: to give name, shape, and humor to the things that haunt us. It does more than take the edge off— it brings us, the audience, into a united human experience when we, with a laugh, realize we’ve all felt the same lostness, uncertainty, and weirdness.

Send All Available Softness Gentle Gentle. Risograph, wheat paste on wood panel. 8.5" x 11" x 2”

Russell’s work has a sensibility in common with memes, a form of visual expression that he enjoys and has seen his art turned into, for better or worse. The endlessly adaptable iterations combine a few words and an image to symbolize a larger, shared idea, often embedded with humor and irony. In the same way, Russell describes his paintings and prints; memes are “deceptively simple.”

Russell incorporates titles visibly into his pieces, but we are still left to fill in the space provided with our own sense of meaning. The titles function as poems of unfinished thoughts, intended to act as “the hammer to ring a bell inside people” to find something that “resonates with the broader human or regional experience.”

Forgive the Dust. Photocopy, wheat paste, house paint, spray paint on wood panel. 31" x 49" x 2"

Russell affectionately refers to the style of the exhibit as “kindergarten minimalism,” with the intimate imperfection of handwritten words complementing imaginative ambiguity and grounding the aura of a feeling. The pieces can be consumed in a poster format, quickly conferring all the details in a glance, but they reach further within to clean out the proverbial closet when we have time on our hands to let the mind wander.

Dust bunnies of old memories and versions of the self, like the “Favorite Shirt and Sweater, 1997-2007,” hanging unaltered, urge us to sit with overwhelming feelings and overwhelming times. We can then fill Russell’s provided framework with the nuance of interpretation and no one to tell you with certainty and strict rules that your opinion is an incorrect one.

“Memory Ghost” by Nathaniel Russell will be on display in the Harrison Center’s Speck Gallery for December. The exhibit can be viewed in-person by appointment and in our online gallery, where all pieces are available for purchase.