Rusty brings an eclectic educational background, including aerospace engineering and music composition, to his art practice. His personal influences are just as varied, ranging from “music, playing piano, knitting, and math.” It is no surprise then that Scruby’s photographic reconstructions incorporate unique technical processes engineered by the artist himself.
The underlying mathematical element of his work harmoniously weaves its way to a surface of lyrical imagery, often referring to a love of nature developed in his formative years on the island of Kwajalein. Natural transitions such as sunset, tide and flora, and various opposing relationships such as pattern | chaos, memory | present, and focus | abstraction all lend themselves to Scruby’s poetic compositions.
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Rusty ScrubyKeeping Up Appearances, 2012Photographic reconstruction35.50 x 46 in
90.17 x 116.84 cmView more details -
Rusty ScrubyAll I See Is Gray, 2011Photographic reconstruction48 x 36 in
121.92 x 91.44 cmView more details -
Rusty ScrubyDad, 2011Photographic reconstruction33 x 23 in
83.82 x 58.42 cmView more details -
Rusty ScrubyOregon Coast, 2011Photographic reconstruction52 x 36 x 6 inView more details
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Rusty ScrubyTree Climbing, 2011Photographic reconstruction77 x 26 in
195.58 x 66.04 cmView more details -
Rusty ScrubyBetween Two Worlds, 2010Photographic reconstruction48 x 48 in
121.92 x 121.92 cmView more details -
Rusty ScrubyTreble, 2007Mixed media construction47.50 x 35.50 in
120.65 x 90.17 cmView more details -
Rusty ScrubyLeaf, 2006Mixed media reconstruction71 x 46 in
180.34 x 116.84 cmView more details
By cutting up and reassembling photographs and drawings, Rusty Scruby distorts once-clear images through a systematic process. Scruby’s reconstructions conform to grids and complex mathematical patterns, in effect producing optical rhythms that confer visual harmony on the images, despite the artist’s abstraction of his sources. Scruby’s process is rooted in a background in craft and engineering, and his interest in the transformations undergone through memory. “I’m always investigating stitches and how things hold on,” he says. “That’s where a lot of my structure ideas come from.”
Rusty Scruby has exhibited both nationally and abroad including exhibitions in Miami, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Philadelphia, Chicago and Seoul, South Korea. In 2010, Scruby received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for his solo exhibition presented by Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont. His work is in major public collections including: the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, Stephen Pyles Restaurant, Microsoft Corporation, Capital One, Lamar University, the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
