Virginia Scruggs

Virginia Scruggs is an American photographer. Scruggs lives and works in Birmingham and Nova Scotia. Though her work is currently based in art photography Scruggs has also worked in documentary photography as well as, landscape photography and portraiture. Having experimented in many different types of photography including gelatin silver, polaroid, iris and digital, Scruggs excells in large scale digital and gelatin silver printing.

In the 1990s, Scruggs worked on a series of horses but unlike other artists who have used horses only as additions to scenic pastoral views, Scruggs' work went further chosing to personalize them in a way that would capture their soul. Sometimes she allowed parts of the horses themselves to be a landscapes likened to a horizon with the tuffs of their manes mimiking trees, sage brush and grasses.

In a related series, Scruggs paid homage to one of her beloved horses who had died by using photography to record how the land was taking it back with bones and grass combining and blurring the idea of nature and nurture in a very natural yet mysterious way.

Scruggs is a founding member of Stare Studio along with Melissa Springer and Karen Graffeo. Other artists who are part of Stare are Carol Cooper, Joe Mays, Denise Modling, Sonja Rieger, Kim Riegel, and Carolyn Sherer. This diverse group of award-winning photographers, utilizing a variety of techniques, exhibit a range of fine-art photography. Their subject matter include documentary, portraiture, and landscape images. From 1992 and until it closed in 2000, Scruggs was a stable artist of and represented by Agnes.

Scruggs is an active member of the Photography Guild of the Birmingham Museum of Art, which is one of the most important members' groups of the museum providing vital support to the museum's photography collection through programming and funding for acquisitions.

Scruggs is a longterm supporter of the arts and has accumulated most of her art collection through her relationships to many artists in the art world including Ruth Bernhard, Shig Ikeda, Patricia Gaines, Chris Lawson, Lori Salcedo Mitrani, Jack Spencer and Melissa Springer among so many others, both painters and photographers.

Most recently, Scruggs' work was part of "Contour: The Definitive Line" curated by Jon Coffelt. One of seventeen artists selected from across the country who were asked to define what they thought contour meant to them. The exhibition was the culmination of this subjective approach.

Quotes

• Virginia Scruggs' shapes become a reflection and an inflection of our own reality. Ever-changing, these bubble-works expand what we understand on the surface by reflecting information back to us in a convex form. Upside-down and backwards, we rethink the lines of the known boundaries of expression. -- Jon Coffelt

External links

• "Contour: The Definitive Line" Schedler Minchin Gallery, Birmingham, Alabama
• Stare at Gallery 2306
• New American Painting #34, (Southern Edition) portrait pg. 37 Open studio Press, Wellesley, Massachusetts, Volume 6, Number 3, ISSN 1066-2235