About

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 …