Artwork Description
Rusty Scruby – Crown Point, 2014
Dimensions: 44 x 35 x 3″ finished size
Year: 2014
Medium: photographic reconstruction
In his work Crown Point, Rusty Scruby has taken an image of a nature scene from the side of a road and fragmented it into multiple, three dimensional structures. Scruby constructs a series of tensions within the work by pairing the natural with the man made and organic forms with the linear, contributing to a sense of formal and visual ambivalence within the work. Cohesive with the intersectionality that informs his artistic process, Crown Point represents a marriage between science and art both in the manner in which the work has been constructed and in the use of an image turned sculpture.
In his photographic and sculptural pieces, Rusty Scruby explores the way images can provide a visual and structural basis for three-dimensional works. Rather than remaining limited to the flatness of a more traditional picture plane, Scruby manipulates photographs through techniques seen in knitting and geometry in a way that renders the images into intricate, interwoven constructions. Scruby describes, “The idea that a 2-D image could translate into multiple 3-D structures reinforces that an image can be subordinated into merely a symbol, a vessel for information”. In some pieces, the image informing the work is more easily recognized, whereas in others the subject matter has been distorted almost to the point of abstraction; Scruby’s work in the Turner Carroll show can be divided into his Cube Network and Cherry Blossom pieces, named for their respective addition or loss of visual information. In his Cherry Blossom work, Scruby uses a technique that pixelates his images by reducing them to the summation of their individual colors, while his Cube Network pieces establish a ‘visual frequency’ by compressing information into a constructive pattern.
by Keira Seidenberg