VIEW NOW AT: https://bit.ly/3oAiuJ8
With surgical blades and a meticulous hand, Kim Rugg (b. 1963, Canada) dissects and reassembles newspapers, stamps, comic books, cereal boxes and postage stamps in order to render them conventionally illegible. The front page of the New York Times becomes neatly alphabetized jargon, debunking the illusion of its producers’ authority as much as the message itself. Through her re-appropriation of medium and meaning, she effectively highlights the innately slanted nature of the distribution of information as well as its messengers.
“Some people like taking their time,” says Kim Rugg, whose artistic achievements are measured in millimeters, spent X-ACTO blades and picas. We spent the afternoon with Rugg in her London home and studio talking about her work re-imagining newspapers, comics, stamps and cereal boxes using their existing form while rearranging their content. Kim finds inspiration from the mundane and common objects around us. Her wicked knife skills and tenacious attention to detail have create a body of work that is as impressive as it is curious.
Matter is neither created nor destroyed in Kim Rugg’s work, but surgically, strategically repurposed. Rugg reconfigures familiar printed materials: here newspapers, magazines and maps; previously also postage stamps, comic books and cereal boxes. By altering their forms and tweaking or altogether eliminating their legibility, she slams on the visual brakes, forcing a closer, slower inspection of objects we typically look through rather than at. The raw materials of her enterprise give up their transparency and functionality as information delivery systems to become instead sculptural interpretations of those same systems. They sacrifice one type of authority, but assume another.
Rugg is renowned for her meticulous and labor-intensive work which involves deconstructing and slicing an object into minute shards to then re-organise and reconstruct it according to arbitrary codes. The original meaning is removed in order to reveal new ones, and to corrupt or destroy the object’s function. This act of mischievous “sabotage” is applied to ephemeral and iconic objects such as newspapers, comic books, product boxes, sweaters and stamps, and more recently to larger formats such as wallpaper – and, by doing so, she turns a neutral vehicle for a message into an object to be considered.
By giving value to something which would normally be disposed of, Rugg transgresses conventional systems by obliterating what is conceived to be the important element, “the content”, and retaining everything else, the material, the shapes, the typography, the colour palettes and the layout. Through the new works presented in the exhibition, she continues her investigation into the relationship between images and their signifier. She questions the way in which the information we process daily is preconceived and prompts the viewer to consider the familiar from an entirely new perspective.
Related Links:
KIM RUGG: IN RETROSPECT
https://bit.ly/3LoLgFC
Kim Rugg ARTSY Viewing Room:
https://bit.ly/3LlKMjy
Cool Hunting Video On Kim Rugg’s Process:
https://youtu.be/Us55hVDg-ZE
Rugg Statements MAPS Catalog:
https://www.markmoorefineart.com/attachment/en/581c5e0c84184e51358b4568/Press/581c5ea984184e51358b80c3
Art In America Review:
https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/kim-rugg-61624/
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