Rusty Shackleford: The Physicality of Revisiting Old Haunts

Oct 21st – Dec 2nd 2017

Copperheads. A shuffling of feet in the autumn leaves. Light of dusk. Silhouettes. Sherbert orange, orange pink, and cerulean blue. Drawings. Humidity. The length of my arm. My circumference. Ghosting. I learned this in Chicago. Chresten. Bunker Brew. Fenchel. Breathing. Long sheets of paper. Wanting to have the space to feel my circumference. Dust. Ink. Powder. Rubber. My forearm. My bicep. Crowded lungs. Cracking and breaking sticks of powder. A shattering. The Humidity. Color. Squinted eyes. Make-do. What have you? What is left? Bare Knuckles....The wrist. Mistakes. Gestures. Bad Habits. Mold. Exhilaration. Rotating and slicing. Breathing. Breathing. Breathing. Meandering. A crooked synthesis and a placid eureka. The space between looking and seeing. And finally stumbling into placement.

- Rusty Shackleford, October 2017

Cindy Rucker Gallery is pleased to present The Physicality of Revisiting Old Haunts, an exhibition of new works by Rusty Shackleford.

The works in this exhibition marks a departure from his more recent works as the artist has left the machinations of the scanner behind in order to re-embrace the large scale drawings of his past. The return of the artist’s hand as seen in this exhibition exchanges the happenstance collage for assiduous abstract drawing; the pieces are worked and reworked, the compositions hide and reveal its histories, arriving at it’s completion only after the artist has finished his decisions. Here he trades the interaction of paint and a found image for a full arm stretch as wide as height and as lingering as a full moment.

Rusty Shackleford, born 1978, in Montgomery, Alabama, received his MFA from University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2004 and has since been shown throughout the Midwest and Berlin, Germany. Shackleford’s work has been written about in Modern Painters, Beautiful Decay, Flavorpill, and ArtFCity in addition to others. He has been a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center and Harold Arts. He has also been featured at MDW Art Fair with Hinge Gallery and Untitled Miami with Cindy Rucker Gallery.