Reconstructed- Sights and Sounds of a Modern-day Weaver

Reconstructed- Sights and Sounds of a Modern-day Weaver
by Cris Worley

What inspires Dallas-based artist, Rusty Scruby, is only a fraction of his highly complex, engineering-based process of creating. “I want to see pat­tern the way we hear pattern in music,” says Scruby. A former student of both aerospace engineering and music com­position, Scruby manifests these skills into his work, producing a sleek and intri­cate harmony of math and music.

Starting with a simple snapshot, Scruby makes thousands of identical inkjet prints. Based on the type of con­struction he wishes to create – a flat or undulating surface, a helix, he crops out and cuts certain images into pre­cise “facets” which are engineered to interlock perfectly with one another. By interlocking these small pieces of paper, Scruby “weaves” the form much like one would weave knit fabric. This technique derives from a curious and longstanding-history of knitters in the artist’s family.

Pattern is the foundation of the work, both conceptually and visually. Initially, the viewer witnesses an orderly montage of a single image in replicate, each segment slightly varied from the one before. But the result is not straight­forward, to say the least. With a little more time spent viewing these pieces, these patterns give way to a deeper understanding of the universal laws of science and mathematics. Like com­plexity theory, which studies the relation­ship between pattern and randomness, and like the combined frequencies of sound in music, Scruby’s mathematical inspirations seek to show the tension between the whole and the sum of its parts, between the original image and the constructed one.

While past works have revolved primarily around nostalgic childhood photographs, recent subject matter includes innocuous images of railroad crossings, traffic signs, meadows and fields of flowers. These quiet, even mun­dane themes burst into multifaceted, rhythmic schemes, creating haunting memories of the past and altered views of reality.

In the foreground of what would be a humble, urban landscape we see in Railroad Crossing, a large traffic sign deconstructed into several microcosmic components. While we recognize the sign to indicate a railroad crossing this visual schism does not reflect its true identity. Herein lies the essence of the work-the comparison between reality and that which comprises it. In this work, Scruby takes his concepts one step further. By weaving the surface into an undulating form he adds another instrument to his visual symphony, underpinning even more his ideas of “visual music” and sound waves.

Rusty Scruby recognizes the small, unseen parts of reality, which many of us do not even know exist. By bringing them to a visual realm he shows the viewer a new way of looking, even a new dimension.

Rusty Scruby – Between Two Worlds

Starting with snapshots from the family album, the artist’s own photographs, prints, drawings, or even plain paper, the images and materials are duplicated from scores to hundreds of times. The product of this is cut, then woven together to create tessellated patterns evocative of everything from a fly’s eye view to the cadence of ocean waves tempered by coral reefs. The less literal source material displays Scruby’s transformation of form to metaphor to best effect. “Reef,” an eight-foot long construction made of interlocking clear and white report covers, transforms at a distance into rain-dappled amethyst waters that segue into white sandy beaches; “Disturbance” weaves together sheets of plain white paper into undulations reminiscent of still waters rippled by a tossed stone.

For the works that are sourced from Scruby’s childhood photos, fractions of images draw the viewer close to search for clues found in the conventions of photographic representation, then quickly pushes us away, searching for a gestalt that can be woven together in the mind’s eye. In “Kwajalien”—the exhibition’s largest work at nearly fifteen feet long—we see the artist’s sister playing to the camera while the artist fades to a blurred cipher in the background. In “Aunti Dotti” Kodachrome colors dazzle while the work’s namesake’s staccato reiterations are read as pure pattern. In one sense moving in close and away becomes a dialog between Roland Barthes’ punctum, defined as the point in a photograph that draws us into the image and makes the work resonate, and Ferdinand de Saussure’s signified, what the representation manifests in our mind.

Scruby’s Goldberg variations of photographic assemblage in “On The Beach” shows the artist has honed his technique well while expanding the work’s the scope and play. Captured in the both the minor variations inherent in handcrafted work, and the intentional variation in the interlocking patterns are the forgotten details and reinvented moments of a long-past event. In “Kwajalien Rain” a flurry of windswept palms blows over the image of a home on the beach, calling to mind the force of nature—not as a threat—but a source of childhood wonder. While not precise in remembering, Scruby’s finished views are more poetic, thus trumping the mathematics that underpins the work.