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.
Unsteady Foundation, 2023
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.