The Samstag Alumni

The 2000 Anne & Gordon Samstag
International Visual Arts Scholarships

John Harris | Károly Keserü | Marco Masci | David Ralph | Elvis Richardson | Sally-Ann Rowland | Troy Ruffels | Paula Wong

The relative unknowability of the image is exploited in the photographic work of Troy Ruffels via the multifarious and multilayered points of reference encoded therein. Ruffels's images negotiate the plethora of intersecting concerns which have incrementally colonized the once contradictory space between the twin poles of art and life; the continuing ubiquity of the modernist grid now extrapolated into an increasingly fragmented illusion of repetition that draws as much from Mandelbrot as it does from Mondrian - the conflation of macro and micro elements that constitute the Euclidian and quantum dimensions of the world as we know it, and issues environmental that continue to haunt us in contradistinction of our facility to simulate natural realities.

All this is further compounded by Ruffels's use of state-of-the-art digitalisation, in which the photographic analogue is transformed into a second-order electronic code that adds another chapter to the teasing out of the tangled threads of reality and abstraction.

James Moss
from his Samstag catalogue essay;
The World is not Enough

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• The Samstag Alumni

Location III (installation view) 1999
digital inkjet prints on canvas
300 x 1200 cm
© the artist

Location III (detail) 1999
digital inkjet prints on canvas
300 x 1200 cm
© the artist