Jake Brush

Biography

An interdisciplinary artist working within the fields of video, sculpture, and performance, Jake Brush wryly satirizes and celebrates the excesses of American culture and media.

Born in 1994 on Long Island, Brush became quickly attuned to the quirks and eccentricities of the area; many of his childhood experiences would later go on to inform his work. Brush graduated from SUNY Purchase in 2016 where he studied Film, New Media, and Visual Art. While at Purchase, Brush studied with Michael Bell-Smith, who shares Brush’s interest in intertextual, witty media remixing and Internet culture.

Drawing from programs like Hoarders, The Real Housewives franchise, and Survivor, Brush’s videos encompass core facets of American reality TV: egregious wealth, familial trauma and alcoholism, tactical self-mythologizing, bitter interpersonal conflict, and fleeting moments of human connection. Much of Brush’s work draws from the artist’s childhood on Long Island, restaging contemporary tragedies and family gossip in a setting where curious engagement precedes moral judgment. Remixing the consumerist lingo of social media and self-referential chatspeak of contemporary internet culture, Brush tells absurd stories about the mundanity of American life. Brush’s actors often perform in drag, their bodies augmented by synthetic masks and heavy makeup. The artist’s use of gender transgression as a performance tool—which evokes the madcap sensibilities of Jack Smith and Charles Ludlam—confronts the shallow artifice of reality television by reappropriating its maximalism. Brush’s approach also aligns with Ryan Trecartin and Jacolby Satterwhite, who utilize digital culture and queer sociality as the basis for sensorially rich video works. Videos like Mall, Interrupted (2025), This Unremarkable Life (2025), and Laundry Detergent (Cheers!) (2025) target celebrity tabloids, the garishness of the ultra-rich, and content consumption, exposing how popular media commodifies subjectivity. Brush’s lighthearted and irreverent style pokes fun at the ways that human consciousness has effectively merged with its electronic representations.

Brush has exhibited work in solo and group presentations at institutions including Wave Hill, Duplex, The Shed, International Objects, MIX NYC, and Kunstplaats Vonk, Hasselt, BE. He has participated in residency programs including Shanken: Storm King, Signal Culture, and the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred State. Brush currently lives and works in New York.