Artwork Description
Rusty Scruby – The Lookout
Dimensions: 25.5 x 19.5″ unframed
Year: 2013
Medium: photographic reconstruction
In The Lookout, Rusty Scruby provokes a sense of memory; through the work’s distorted and almost dreamlike surface, Scruby renders a scene that appears to be on the cusp of remembrance or a moment experienced through the haze of time. Unlike several of his other works, The Lookout is more easily identified as a beach scene, however, with its pixelated surface, Scruby captures the tension between a feeling of abstraction and a distinct image. Scruby also employs his characteristic technique of rendering a two-dimensional photographic into a three-dimensional sculpture, where viewers must more closely engage with the work to understand its depth.
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