Artwork Description
Rusty Scruby – Sunshine
Dimensions: 20 x 25″ unframed
Year: 2009
Medium: photographic reconstruction
In his photographic reconstruction, Sunshine, Rusty Scruby uses the title of the work and its visual qualities to establish a conflicted meeting of sensory and visual information. The word sunshine evokes a physical sensation of warmth, while Scruby’s use of digital photography is suggestive of a technological, and therefore, removed presence. Scruby also distorts traditional associations of sunshine as something soft and yellow, by representing it through bold complementary shades, reminiscent of peering at a neon sign through a faceted window—simultaneously interjecting tension between the natural and a suggestion of the man made.
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