Dallas, TX – Cris Worley Fine Arts is proud to present Summer Breeze, a new solo exhibition by Texas-based artist Rusty Scruby, opening Saturday, September 6, from 5 to 7pm. The exhibition runs through October 25, 2025. The artist will be in attendance.
With Summer Breeze, Scruby invites us into an emotional and perceptual journey through time, loss, and memory. The exhibition reflects a deeply personal chapter in the artist’s life, shaped by the loss of his parents, the isolation of the pandemic, political unrest, and shifting circadian rhythms. These works become both meditative portals and therapeutic practices—spaces where reflection and transformation meet.
Known for his intricate, mathematically derived constructions that blur the line between image and object, Scruby explores themes of memory loss and cognitive fragmentation. By intentionally reducing visual resolution and working with pixelated and abstracted imagery, he evokes the sensation of fading memories and the passage of time.
Scruby’s mother's battle with memory loss further deepened his interest in how the brain processes, distorts, and eventually releases visual information. In this light, his explorations of pixelation and abstraction feel both scientific and tender—investigating the moment when image becomes impression, and familiarity gives way to feeling.
Works in the show draw inspiration from literature and news: while transitioning to night-time working hours, Scruby became captivated by stories of high-altitude balloons—both from contemporary headlines and the 19th-century fantasies of Edgar Allen Poe and Jules Verne. This led to a body of work that captures the surrealism and wonder of drifting between realms: sea and sky, fiction and reality.
Working with gradients, knit forms, and visual reduction, Scruby creates sensory environments that hint at warmth of the sun’s rays dancing upon leaves, light refracting through ocean depths, and mysterious forms casting shadows above the ocean floor. These images do not merely depict—they immerse, drawing viewers into the blurred threshold between recognition and abstraction.