Slow Time in a Fast Feed

It was the recent ode to the groundhog roadkill that did it for me. The taking of the time to share a thought and a parting adios to the fallen woodchuck, required commitment. Not the time commitment to write a farewell tweet, rather, the commitment to notice. Notice long enough throughout the days, to recognize and acknowledge the groundhog as a neighbor.

There is such a thing as the art of living and the artist Cat Russell is taking no prisoners. Have met very few people with a genuine understanding of their self-worth as with Cat. First, there's the artist's deep respect towards his own artistic practice, a respect that keeps clear of compromises and shortcuts. I envision his practice bordering on the monastic, laden with rituals and patterns. In a way, it's a doubling down of sorts on living as an art-form.

And yet he’s equally fluent on-chain. The same discipline shows up in how he builds his releases: clean metadata, clear provenance, thoughtful pacing, contracts that do what they’re supposed to do. No gimmicks; just architecture. The studio is devotion, the blockchain is clarity, two rooms, one ethic.

I was first introduced to Cat's work in occasion of Hive Mind, a group show we exhibited last November. His work, Honey, a painstaking, realistic, black and white collage of a young man's torso, clad in a striped crew tee, with a prominent, yellowish wasp on the forearm, was as intricate and masterful in assemblage and execution, as it was poignant in its underlying theme as a commentary on the opioid epidemic laying waste to the Appalachian towns the artist calls home.

Honey sits in memory because it refuses melodrama. The subject could easily tilt into pity or spectacle. Instead, the piece holds. The young man’s torso is steady; the wasp reads as omen and tenderness at once. That tension, care without sentimentality, is hard to pull off, and it suits the context. Appalachian towns carry the weight of a story that has been told badly for decades: outsiders arrive to perform concern; insiders endure. The collage method, with its stubborn slow-build, answers that misuse by insisting on time. You don’t get to fake your way to this surface. You have to cut, place, press; cut, place, press. The labor becomes a kind of witness, and Diid is one lucky bastard for collecting this gem.

During his stay at the gallery, I had the opportunity to experience the process of assembling his collages. He looked like a surgeon at work, exacting with his cuts and measured with his gluing. The result, paper layers so tightly assembled to look like works of ink on drawing paper.

Let’s return to that small roadside ceremony. Why linger there in an essay about an artist? Because the groundhog anecdote isn’t a detour, it’s the map. Most of us move through the day like passengers on a blur. We register shapes and headlines, then outsource memory to feeds. The cost is subtle: we lose the ability to absorb the slow information in a scene. Cat’s work fights that loss. He builds images that reward returning. At first glance: a torso, a bee, a shirt’s stripe, a knuckle’s shadow. Then, step in. The shirt’s stripe is three papers whispering to each other. The knuckle’s shadow is made of something that once was a cathedral arch. The wasp’s wing carries a sliver of old comics, speech bubbles turned to texture. The image is a conversation of leftovers made whole.

I've been meaning since to organize a solo show with Cat, and this week I'll have the honor to host a early-to-mid-career survey of the artist at the gallery this coming Friday. The show, Offcuts, offers up 20 works spanning the last 3 years of the artist's period. analog collages, each paired with its corresponding NFT.

Pairing each work with its NFT is not an afterthought or a hedge; it’s a clarity move. On-chain provenance offers collectors what the analog market often muddies: a verifiable, public record that describes a work’s origin and stewardship. In Cat’s case, the on-chain record functions like an index at the end of a book, a way to navigate without confusion. There’s a practical elegance to that, and it mirrors his studio standards. If the collage is built from fragments reconciled into a surface, the ledger is built from entries reconciled into a story.

There’s also an ethic of restraint here. He doesn’t overload releases with tricks. No animated reveal to mask a thin idea. No utility promises that sprawl. The work leads; the contract follows.

Stand before the pieces and you can feel the stubbornness that made them. The edges are crisp without being fussy. The values (those delicate steps between light and dark) arrive from choices that are both tiny and final. Once paper is down, it’s down. That irreversibility matters. We live in a culture that loves the undo button. Collage doesn’t offer one. You commit or you start again. .

Cat’s own statement frames Offcuts better than any wall text. He refuses the boilerplate, instead, he writes, “I’ll simply write this as me, and in a way, to me.” He describes a methodical, meditative practice at odds with a culture of speed and highlight reels, and wonders if the “epic” still has a place. His answer is a wager: meaning is a choice, and he gives as much of it to the process as to the outcome.

The title, suggested by Luca Ponsato, lands cleanly: Offcuts, “the leftover scraps and materials that remain after something is created.” The works are literally built from remnants, old comics, tagboard, Gustave Doré prints, but the word also names an ethic: a “leftover” practice that starves the algorithm and feeds intention. Not rushing to the end. Savoring the doing.

Roadside noticing, studio devotion, on-chain clarity. Offcuts argues for long looking, how we build a life, how we build a work, and how we choose what deserves our attention.

Michele Colonna