DESCRIPTION:
Like his work, Harsh Patel resists labels with a clearly articulated passion. He studied design in Austin but considers himself largely self-taught. For his next move, he’s joining his friend Ryan Waller in Brooklyn at Thingmaking, an emerging art studio. Their client list is still largely under wraps, but current projects include work for various music labels and a skateboard company.

VOICE:
Patel likes unusual juxtapositions, strong colors, and “dirty, tornup stuff—things that feel natural, like you’ve just pulled them out of your pocket.” His work combines enigmatic wit and boldface challenge, often in equal measure. He moves quickly through projects according to the dictates of his mood and admittedly fickle attention span. An earlier website, Gutterlife.com, opens with a vaguely sinister story of high-school girls meeting for a movie. A line of 1960s yearbook headshots along the bottom links each girl to an unsettling, tantalizingly incomplete image: A view of her scary inner life? Her secret fears? The narrator’s darkest urges toward her? Although Patel’s interests are moving on from web work, his current projects still excite the viewer with incompleteness and possibility.

DISTINCTIVE MARKINGS:
Patel delights in mailing artwork and odd scraps of ephemera with his friends—the odder the better. He fondly recalls receiving a receipt for a jar of peanut butter from one friend. Also, don’t be put off by his first name: It’s actually the Indian word for happiness.

HABITAT:
Thingmaking is an airy workspace located in a stretch of old factories in Brooklyn. The studio is steps from the South Brooklyn Casket Company and a true-blue Italian restaurant for firemen, The Two Toms. It’s fairly threadbare, aside from Waller’s recent inclusion of a ping-pong table. Mostly, though, its tenants prefer to keep it “empty and clean—a place to get work done.”

SPOTTED BY:
Joshua Davis, Joshua Davis Studios, Mineola, N.Y.: “Arthur C. Clarke is quoted as saying, ‘The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.’ I think Harsh is living this. Limits are boundaries we give ourselves, and his neverending passion to do things unconventionally is commendable.”

CONTACT:
www.harshpatel.com | www.thingmaking.com

Written by Jude Stewart