John Bell Rush
(b. 1999, South Orange, New Jersey)

I am a lens-based artist working with photography, video, sculpture, and text.

I construct queer cosmologies that explore how self-narrative comes to be when a readily available tool (the digital camera) enables us to collect, synthesize, and constellate visions of ourselves and the world around us.

Modes of perception characterized by ephemerality, distortion, luminosity, absence, and desire, predominate my photographs.

Personals, 2025


Ongoing Work, 2025



Unsteady Foundation
, 2023


  • Middletown, CT

 Site-specific installation at Wesleyan’s Zilkha Gallery.

Primary materials: newsprint, a table found on Facebook Marketplace modified into a light-box, transparency paper, video projection, audio narration, and digital images.

Centered on a short story. A narrator goes to a small liberal arts school, waiting for a stranger they met through email, the waiting, taking place in an abandoned art building.

Exploring transparency, intimacy, and a latent queer sense of loss, evoked through modern mediums of mass communication. Guided by photographic principles of light and description.



Stills,
2022, 2021




35mm,
2021, 2022

email: johnbellrush@gmail.com, ig: @johnbellrush