American-Dutch artist Sterling Ruby (b. 1972) won’t commit to a single medium. In a large industrial studio in Vernon, California, he and his team produce paintings, sculptures, garments, ceramics, videos, and many other projects. Ruby has amassed a collection of found images and motifs, which are assembled, layered, and sometimes manipulated with computer-generated filters into photomontages. This combined photographic-collage approach, which Ruby has been developingsince 2005, was first exhibited in “New Photography” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2009.The digital collage entitled “SUNRISE” originates in this same archive of material. A spiderweb’s structure, visible thanks to pearls of morning dew, clings to dying roses whose perspective has been distorted, appearing like leafless trees in the landscape. A fuzzy black and white screen appears in the foreground, covered in a frenzy of crawling ants. A closer look reveals a lush meadow with flowers, where blades of grass subtly spell “SUNRISE”.The composition evokes associations with Baroque still lifes and even nostalgically recalls record covers from 1980s new wave and goth bands. The print touches on concerns elaborated in Ruby’s “DEATH CULT” series, which merged various obsessions around the conjunction of craft and cosmos with similar abstracted text overlays, and also relates to his “DRFTRS” collages, in which he uses his taxonomy of images to create new, hybridized landscapes