Her blonde wig crests high, arching from a side part and cascading onto the breast of a floral jacket buttoned over a matching miniskirt. Her temples are pulled back using face-lifting tape to create a dramatic, arched brow, and her face is washed out by a spotlight, a pink halo glowing around this televisual angel. “Do you readily admit that you have way too many images? That you are drowning? That you are unmanageable? That you are a representation of something unmanageable?”
She stands, immobilized in digital space as the monologue loops around her, delivered in the tone of a slightly mechanical motivational speaker. “It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that you can’t care for these images. Or tend to their needs. Because there are just too many of them. Do you literally see these images as your children? Because no one sees you as their mother. You know these images have got to go.”
This demented diva is Long Island’s finest: 29-year-old Jake Brush, who has been terrorizing New York’s underground art scene for the past few years with his loosely connected constellation of video works, art objects, installations, and performances. This latest vision of high-glam mall drag comes courtesy of This Unremarkable Life, 2023–24.
Blending the early social media mania of Ryan Trecartin with the animated phantasmagoria of Jacolby Satterwhite, Brush is the newest incarnation of low-budget, high-concept queer provocation—a lineage that reaches back to Jack Smith and Charles Ludlam. Which is to say that Jake Brush revels in trash, the foundation of our collective psyche. He burnishes it and transforms it into incisive works that will make you laugh until you cry. Or throw up. Or both.
Brush’s videos and performances hijack the syntax of television competitions and Instagram confessionals—controlled forums in which people enact dramatized versions of themselves in highly artificial contexts. He lives for, and on, the internet: Reddit message boards, long-running campy TV series like Survivor, and B-level horror films like Killer Klowns From Outer Space are longtime sources of inspiration.
Rendered with maximum camp, Brush dramatizes a kaleidoscopic self that is becoming increasingly prevalent in our culture—fractured, derivative, and desperate for enagement. Brush’s acid-tinged comedy is also a decoy to explore something darker: the ways people betray themselves and their loved ones for the briefest glimpses of attention. “There is something so honest about these super exploitative situations,” Brush says. “I get that desperation. I get not knowing better. I get reaching for something to fix everything else.”
Brush’s characters are not mouthpieces for public virtue or his own private feelings, but expressions of the collective hallucination that each of us is special. Last year, Brush debuted Petpourri, 2023, an installation inspired by a pet store in his Long Island hometown, as one of the Shed’s 2023 Open Call commissions.
In the work, which goes on view this week at Brooklyn’s International Objects, a character in the midst of a nervous breakdown (played by Brush, disguised by a pair of bulbous and testicular prosthetic cheeks) fantasizes about the cessation of pet shop samsara: “I want to strap a Drano bomb to my chest where the main ingredient prevents all the animals ever from existing—not from pain or death or disfigurement but like, just gone. It ends this cycle, you know, of being picked up, put down, put into boxes, collecting dust on the floor, fed, overfed the wrong things, not fed enough...”
This self-referential mythology can be traced back through Brush’s early video works, like The Multiple Murders of Lady Gilgo, presented by the artist in 2021 at Duplex art space in Chinatown. It focuses on the “Hot Dog Hooker,” an early-2000s media sensation who, Brush posits, drowned out coverage of a string of real-life murders by the Gilgo Beach serial killer.
“People ask me how many interesting people there are in Long Island. My answer is—a lot,” he says. “My challenge to that question is to say that my art is also about my family. About the gossip of the family, the drama of the family. That extends into the character of this particular place where we live. But it goes beyond that, into reality television, too, and media—all the things we talk about.” Which is to say it’s about all of us, an unflattering reflection that should make us scream, cry, and throw up.
"Extra Taste," featuring Petpourri, will be on view from February 10 through April 21, 2024 at Internation Objects in New York.
