Rusty Shackleford: Repeater

February 1 – March 9, 2014

Cindy Rucker Gallery presents Repeater, an exhibition of new work by Rusty Shackleford. The exhibition will feature Shackleford’s Lambda prints and sculptural arrangements, which strike a surprising equilibrium between readymade and invention. This is his first solo exhibition in New York.

Rusty Shackleford creates elusive artworks. His works investigate the relationship between image and form, engaging vintage printed matter to extrude its inherent qualities, of color, context, and nostalgia. As both a painter and a collage artist, he utilizes found imagery and objects to create pieces that have both tension and cohesiveness. By applying swaths of paint to found magazine pages, either directly or digitally, he sets up an interaction that obscures the image. He then enlarges the piece, magnifying the physicality of the paint and grain of the found material. Shackleford’s smudged compositions aren’t created by the artist but rather by the scanner lid. He’s unsure of what he has until the scanned image appears on his screen. He is uninterested in creating staged abstract paintings; moreover he’s interested in capturing the quickness of happenstance. With this censorship, he commands his viewer to make leaps across the picture plane to explain the image all the while having to contend with the very real, larger than life abstract painting in their way.

His sculptural arrangements function similarly to his prints. Using aspects of collage, these arrangements create relationships between images and objects. Color and form, executed boldly in a minimal, Modernist style, integrate smoothly with the colors and forms in their surroundings.