Communal Still Life | Rachael Layne Rush

For the creation of Community Still Life, Rachael Layne Rush invited museum visitors to arrange objects from a set she had gathered into compositions that were used as the basis for a series of still life drawings. Rush selected the objects because they spoke to the artist as informing her sense of gender identity. As visitors created their compositions for Rush to draw they exchanged stories about the personal significance of the objects and the way that the arrangements spoke to an aspect of the arranger’s lived experience. Rush sent a digital copy of each drawing to the person who helped to create it. A book featuring the drawings was also made and is displayed in the first floor bathroom along with a case preserving the objects as artifacts from a performance. Rush’s project speaks to the way that the development of identity is entwined with the objects that surround us, as well as the highly personal processes by which individuals attach meaning to things.

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