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

Visual artist working with photography, newsprint, video, light, and shadow.

Uses lens-based approaches to construct queer cosmologies in the face of environmental collapse.

Exploring modes of perception characterized by ephemerality, distortion, luminosity, absence and desire.
Feed Overview
Personals, 2025


Ongoing, 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 lightbox, transparency paper, video projection, audio narration, and digital images.

Centered on a short story. A narrator goes to a small liberal arts school, disillusioned and 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