Rusty Scruby – Sunflower

$7,500

SKU: 21669

Artwork Description

Rusty Scruby – Sunflower

Dimensions: 49.5 x 31.5″ unframed
Year: 2004
Medium: photographic reconstruction

Rusty Scruby’s work, Sunflower, is a photographic reconstruction that encourages a sense of audience participation; viewed from different angles and at varying distances, the work adopts different visual qualities and resembles more or less closely the original image. The work is laden with nostalgia—the sunflower is fragmented into numerous, smaller images that recall pressing one’s eye to the mouth of a kaleidoscope as a child. Scruby’s piece also evades any form of definitive visual classification; while the piece is made from a photographic reconstruction, it also has comparable features to a painting or three-dimensional structure.

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