Shawn Bush

Lens-based artist Shawn Bush grew up in Detroit, MI, a city whose civic history and geographic location have profoundly influenced the way he thinks about physical space within American sociopolitical and socioeconomic landscapes. His photographs and collages are responsive to over-built systems, failing icons, and collapsing mythologies. Bush earned an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from Columbia College Chicago. He is a 2021 recipient of the Aperture CreatorLabs Photo Fund, a 2021 Wyoming Arts Council Fellow, and a 2017 Lenscratch Student Prize winner. His debut monograph A Golden State won the handmade category at the 2016 Lucie Photobook Prize (NYC) and is included in several noted collections, including the Griffin Museum of Photography (Boston, MA), Benaki Museum (Athens, Greece), and Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL).

The photographs and multi-exposure collages created inside of a 4×5 inch large format camera from Angle of Draw examine the Caucasian American males enduring pursuit to sustain power within their own weathering systems of authority. In a culture where patriarchal structures are beginning to erode, the struggle to maintain control, influence, and liberties of yesteryear remain constant for the crumbling empire. Through the lens of environmental dominance and quest for unsustainable sources of fuel, Angle of Draw combines mid-20th-century propaganda photographs with 21st-century responses, juxtaposing eras to interrogate systems that have memorialized and recycled an androcentric ideology as a means of social, political, and economic control for centuries.