In her new exhibit “Bad Nostalgia,” artist Katie Strobel captures the simple, often forgotten, moments in everyday life.
In one painting, a person stands in a parking lot outside a Goodwill store. In another, someone in profile takes a drink from a coffee cup. A third depicts one of Strobel’s friends taking a nap under a table.
Of the 31 watercolor pieces that make up Strobel’s exhibit, some were painted from photos and some were painted from life. Some are more abstract, with saturated swaths of color. In others, the subjects are painted in vibrant detail, from their facial expressions to the way their hair falls. All of the pieces are recent memories from Strobel’s life.
Natalie Patrick, the director of artist resources at Summit Artspace, selected Strobel for the gallery’s winter exhibitions after coming across her work last June at the Groundhog Show, a local pop-up art show.
“The intimate subjects and scenes in Katie’s watercolors and the way she rendered them stood out to me as being very unique in their vision,” Patrick said via email. “I love how her work references candid moments in her own life, as I think we can all relate to them through our own memories.”
Oftentimes, “nostalgia” evokes memories of personal significance, sentimental recollections of a former time. With “Bad Nostalgia,” Strobel turns that notion on its head.
“Thinking about things that are very daily and very mundane, I think those kinds of images evoke a lot of sensitivity and relatability,” said Strobel, who uses she/they pronouns. “Things like people sitting cross-legged on the front floor together, everybody has that. And I think that those kinds of images are very important interpersonally.”
Strobel began working on “Bad Nostalgia” last summer before their final semester at college. At the time, they were also working on their bachelor’s in fine arts exhibit. (Entitled “Don’t Be a Stranger,” that exhibit is currently on display at the Lynn Rodeman Metzger Galleries at the University of Akron’s Institute for Human Science and Culture.)
“I was trying to do something that felt different than [my BFA exhibit], because typically I’m more of a large-scale abstraction kind of guy,” Strobel said. “So going back to my roots and doing smaller illustrative work I think was a really nice dialogue between the two kinds of languages.”
Outside of two larger canvas pieces, all of the paintings in “Bad Nostalgia” are on 5-by-7-inch pieces of paper. Their small scale invites viewers to get in close, to take note of the fine details — the wrinkled shirt of someone in repose in “Front Steps” — and tiny movements — sly grins shared between friends in “Counsel Council”— in the paintings.
As Strobel worked on this collection, she began to form connections between the paintings, and a larger story emerged. On their own, the paintings depict moments in life that are easy to forget. But together, they tell a larger story.
Strobel described it in her artist statement: “People forget to take pictures of things that don’t matter because it’s impossible to photograph qualities such as the feeling of an inside joke, the sound of an exhale through the nose, or dirty silverware that must be returned to the kitchen and replaced. These things act as set pieces for what make[s] up the rest of our lives.”
“Bad Nostalgia” challenges viewers’ ideas of the word and implores them to remember the candid moments that make up their daily existence.
“It’s funny, because in art school, specifically with the people that I was with a lot of time, people were using the word nostalgia a lot — to the point where it didn’t really mean anything,” Strobel said. “And the more you repeat something like that, the less it tends to mean. So when I use the word nostalgia in this context, I’m trying to emphasize that immediacy. It’s already passed before you even think to look back at it.”
“Bad Nostalgia” is on view at Summit Artspace through Saturday, March 16.