STARE
A Retrospective, 2000 – 2010
Mesa Center for Contemporary Art
February 12 – May 16, 2010
Reception, April 9th
Click here to read a review in Art Ltd. Magazine
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Re-Presenting Disability
Activism and Agency in the Museum
Edited by Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd
and Rose Marie Garland-Thomson
Routledge Press, UK
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Summer of 2011
Artist in Residence at Castello in Movimento, Fosdinovo, Italy |
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2011-2012
Exhibitions,
"Don't Look Now," Etherton Gallery, AZ
"Side Show" at Dunedin Art Center, FL
"Local Heroes," at the Mindy Solomon Gallery, FL
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2009
Exhibition with Doug Auld at Davidson College, North Carolina, featuring portraits by the two artists, along with photos by Weegee and Diane Arbus.
Rose Marie Garland, on whose critical writings the exhibition was based, delivered a lecture on the work in mid-October. |
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“STARING: How We Look”
by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Oxford Press, 2009
One of Rush’s most arresting drawings presents a young woman in the regal pose we know from the commemorative portraits of the Italian renaissance. Her likeness emerges from the sharp line her stately features form against the background; her nose and chin lift imperially; her eyes gaze impassively down on the world beneath her. Her head is turbaned with a richly colored and ornately patterned aristocratic headdress, and her shoulders reveal a simple but elegant gown. On first glance, she looks like a modern Florentine lady.
On second glance, however, we recognize a face we have never seen in a portrait. We see the distinct features of a person with Down syndrome, her hair wrapped in a bright beach towel, her face in a faraway reverie, and a simple heart tattooed on her shoulder below her bathing suit strap. The portrait invites us to stare, engrossed perhaps less with the “strangeness” of this woman’s disability and more with the strangeness of witnessing such dignity in a face that marks a life we have learned to imagine as unlivable and unworthy, as the kind of person we routinely detect in advance through medical technology and eliminate from our human community. |
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The Drawing Papers
The Drawing Center, NY 2002
Excerpt of artist interview:
As a child I searched junk shops and thrift stores for evidence of life outside my little world. Over and over I would come across old medical books full of scary and beautiful images, the body grown wild and unfamiliar. These documents haunted me.
Years later I based a painting on a blurry photo from a 1920’s medical text, showing a boy with brittle bone disease. In painting this strange child I realized how much better it would be to work from life than from old books.
In 1998 I began to work in a facility for people with mental and physical disabilities, with the agreement that I would sketch during the quiet hours. This experience has been utterly remarkable for me. I find myself surrounded by what seems to be the original faces, like those seen in Bruegal—unguarded and completely without guile.
After observing for several months I began to make portraits. In rendering these individuals, my view is without judgment. The work seeks to portray the subjects and their existence as natural, rather than pathological. If anything, there is a strange grace around many of these people, and I have found no better way to represent this than as a condition of light. |
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Contemporary Magazine, London, 2002
By Katherine Zoepf
“In making us consider the faces and personalities of people we would ordinarily never see in portraits, Rush may have a social agenda, though he does not preach. The portraits are stark, the subjects have strange skin and staring eyes – one thinks of Jenny Saville, of Lucien Freud – yet they are suffused with a strange sense of grace.
In ‘Gloria’, a young women with a towel wrapped loosely around her head gazes upward, her eyes half closed. A shaft of light falls across her face, illuminating the hooded eyes, the folds of the towel. Suddenly, the towel-turban seems a reference to Vermeer, and you are thrown back several centuries. The subjects become not pathologies, but individuals – beautiful and utterly themselves.
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Exhibitions and Publications