Kim Rugg

Mark Moore Gallery proudly presents Patterns of Landscape, the latest body of work by gallery artist Kim Rugg. With the precision of a surgeon, Rugg dismantles and reassembles printed objects that relay information, such as newspapers, magazines, cereal boxes, and stamps; rendering their original content meaningless. In this exhibition, Rugg embellishes upon her criticism of biased "news" dissemination by experimenting with cartography, as if scrutinizing the physical and social boundaries in which we lead our lives.

For this newest incarnation of her practice, Rugg re-envisions maps of Great Britian, North America, the United States, and the World without borders, featuring a staggeringly precise hand-drawn layout with only city names and regions as reference points. In other works, Rugg redistributes traditional map colors so as to nullify the social preeminence given to constructed territories, highlighting the idea that our attention is manipulated to focus on the powerful few instead of the physical many. Rugg also features works in her traditional newspaper vernacular; her seemingly playful rearrangement of newspapers’ individual letters, photos, and headlines subvert the authority of the messenger, and analyze how alleged facts are blindly consumed. In a manner perhaps likened to analog Photoshopping, Rugg exercises her mastery in trompe l’oeil by depicting an open magazine - in perspective – by using only pieces of the actual publication to achieve a practically surrealist effect. Through this visual ruse, Rugg critiques the media's tendency to seduce its viewership through sensation and illusion rather than verisimilitude. A consistent theme throughout all of her work, patterns within the tactics of journalists, broadcasters, historians, and reporters alike are given clarity through Rugg's purposeful distortion. At first glance, Rugg's work appears disconnected from our regular lines of communication, but upon closer inspection, her visual subterfuge astutely mimics that of the everyday propagandist.

Rugg received her MFA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (London). Her work can be seen in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art (D.C.) and the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (CA), the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), and the Norton Museum (FL), among others. She has been included in exhibitions at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (CA), Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NY), Galerie Schmidt Maczollek (Cologne), and Nettie Horn Gallery (Manchester), and was the recipient of the Thames and Hudson Prize from the Royal College of Art Society in 2004. She lives and works in London (UK).