Between the Surface
May 12 - June 18, 2022
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 12th, 6 - 8 pm
Rusty Shackleford’s work has always been something of a masquerade: paintings hiding as photographs, photographs hiding as paintings, collage as assemblage, movement as static, layers as flat. His viewers are never invited to see the behind the mask. Sure, we are offered glimpses here and there, an eyebrow, an elbow, a splash of pink. But the whole self is always obscured.
Is it because the artist is painfully aware of our tendency to disengage that he entices us with this peek-a-boo? Or is he on a quest himself to discover just which parts are “good” and which are the “bad?” We are inundated with visuals in entertainment, art, even music. Shackleford gives us another layer so that we want to investigate the underneath.
This exhibition begins where the last one ended: a multi-layered collage displaying minute sections of what were once compositions of paint on paper, enlarged to a scale that engulfs a section of the downstairs exhibition space. But now we encounter a new facet: paintings on paintings. Hands off marks have become hands on and the happenstance of the past is now a deliberate line laid by the artist’s hand. The graphic nature of a deliberate stroke is not lost here. We know that the graphic line is a lie that is easy to believe. It is slick and seductive. Obfuscating the lie is a service Shackleford is always happy to provide.
Rusty Shackleford (b. 1978, Alabama, USA) received his MFA from University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2004 and has since been shown throughout the Midwest and Germany. Shackleford’s work has been written about in Modern Painters, Beautiful Decay, Flavorpill, and ArtFCity in addition to others. He is the recipient of a Wyn Newhouse Award and currently works as a Professor of Art at North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro, NC where he lives and works.