Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Local Dallas Artist Rusty Scruby

Last week at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (MAC), I attended an interesting film/talk by local Dallas artist Rusty Scruby. Rusty is represented by Pan American Art Projects here in Dallas. His work is really quite interesting in that his photographs, drawings, and paper works all have one underling continuity, which is mathematics. Rusty sees everything as a relationship of numbers and mathematical equations. A lot of his works remind me of logic puzzles and mind bending games. In his art talk, he mentioned a lot about the natural elements of the sky and water, which tells me he is interested in the idea of fluid dynamics. This makes sense because he is using his mind to calculate mathematical equations from his first interest of study which is aeronautical engineering.
Therefore, Rusty does not consider himself to be an artist, however, the way he composes each photograph re contextualizes the picture plane. He will make several hundred prints of the same image and weave them together, and change their overall percentage ever so slightly. His art looks as though you were seeing through the eyes of a Bee, in other words, a compound eye.
Many people feel that art and science are different from each other, but, in my view, they speak the same language. They just develop a different hypothesis or set of problems. Artists and scientists both utilize their eye as a tool to perceive the world around them by arriving at a conclusion or resolution that can be built upon with each project or experiment.
With an artist such as Rusty Scruby, we can learn how he observes the world through his perceptual experiences of mathematical rhythms that weave in and out of each other through the fabric of time.

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