Belle Isle Viewing Room is pleased to present George Rush: Double Bind. Rush has created  twenty new oil paintings based on selections from his ongoing archive of cell phone photographs: a cruise ship in port under a stormy sky, a decoy owl on a kitchen counter, a detail from a painting by Jan Steen, a motel, a postmodern office building, an illustration of extinct birds of North America, a tree, images of suburban houses, an ancient Roman sculpture of a drunk satyr, a car flipped over on a suburban street, a shelf of self-help books about love and sex, a parking lot at dusk, magazines about guns, tract housing, a strip mall at night, a Rockwell Kent painting of Vermont, an advertisement for Tinder, an empty window, the sun. Rush is interested in presenting images that contain quiet, unresolved conflict and often the promise of resolution feels just out of reach: why these books, these magazines, these houses? These paintings are both generous and withholding -- a realistically depicted window is rich in surface and light but offers no view. Some feature objects seemingly out of place—why would a decoy owl be used inside a kitchen? Rush presents us with a suite of paintings that don’t cohere into a narrative; they become a constellation of moments, a specific view of the present in suburban America.

Structurally, Rush is interested in how multiplicity and variation works---what does a suite of twenty paintings of a broad array of images do. Twenty is too many to keep track of at one time, and yet feels somehow manageable: a double album is about twenty tracks, a novel might have twenty chapters, there are 26 letters in the modern alphabet. At the same time, we are increasingly offered access to “comprehensive” collections, encyclopedic archives of images (Getty, MoMA), music (Spotify), information (Wikipedia). There is a fallacy of ownership, of access, of understanding: that one day we will have it all, listen to it all, understand it all. Instead, we are just scrolling, smug in our daydream about the day when we’ll have the time to really get serious and learn German or listen to all of Miles Davis or read every Balzac novel. But there are moments of beauty and intimacy and humor in Rush’s paintings and a kind of optimism: there are blue skies after all, the promise of sex and pleasure and reconciliation, a life to be lived.