Rusty Scruby b. 1964 — Rusty Scruby 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.” Scruby’s early years spent living on the remote, South Pacific Island of Kwajalein also influence him, through the movement of natural patterns. 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 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.

We see the origin of some of Scruby’s current practice from his 30s, when he would cut out squares and hexagons from old family photos and shift them in the photograph. This results in an abstracted and blurred image, as he shifts the cut-out pieces across grids. These photographic reconstructions see an exploration of repetition and geometry, but also of musical compositions in their mathematical form. Each work takes a large amount of mapping out, as Scruby creates these interlocking images that execute either an abstracted or a realistic image in new shapes.

In the last few years, Scruby began to integrate knitting into his work. He has honeycomb pattern knitted works that can take hundreds of hours. He overlaps colors using the intarsia technique, allowing the different colors to be inlaid together in the whole work. Scruby is also creating constructions, often wooden-base formed sculptures known as “cube networks” that have knitting, or enamel overlaid. Scruby sees this mixture of the structure with the soft yarn as the “blending of male and female or nature and manmade.” At the root of all of Scruby’s work is this desire to recreate mathematically – allowing things to be both constructed and reconstructed.

Rusty Scruby has exhibited both nationally and abroad including exhibitions in Miami, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Philadelphia, Chicago and Seoul, South Korea. Scruby received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 2010. His work is held in private and 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.