Beginning with family snapshots of his childhood years on
Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, the Texas-based artist Rusty Scruby weaves
together multiple layers of photographs to highlight key elements of memory and
let others dissipate into a more generalized recollection of sun, sky, and sea.
Scruby’s complex technique of cutting and interlacing—“photographic
reconstructions,” he calls the resulting pictures—draws on undergraduate
studies in aerospace engineering and musical composition and longtime interests
in mathematics and knitting. “I work with ideas of
tension and relaxation,” he says, “by controlling the amount of repetition in
the image as it travels across the undulating surface."