Res Julian pictures of Pulse nightclub 10 years later

BAXTER ST on the Camera Club of New York presents “True Hole,” debuted on June 17 and working by way of August 12, 2026, that includes lens-based works by 2025 BAXTER ST Resident Res Julian. The exhibition marks a decade-long response to the 2016 taking pictures at Pulse, a queer Latinx nightclub in Orlando, the place 49 folks had been killed. “True Hole” opens 10 years after a privateness fence was erected across the web site within the fast aftermath.

That fence rapidly grew to become a casual memorial, as mourners crammed its openings with flowers, flags, images, and private objects. While such gaps are sometimes required in development fencing to permit visibility and preserve structural integrity, in Orlando their obstruction created a stress between collective grief and bodily stability. The act of filling them risked compromising the barrier itself, threatening to reveal the positioning it was meant to hide.

The works in “True Hole” draw from fragments Julian started in 2016, now interwoven with current self-portraits. Moving between what’s seen and withheld, the pictures considerthe fence not solely as a boundary, however as a requirement: for entry, for witnessing, for which means that’s each historic and deeply private.

The exhibition additionally displays on a shifting terrain of illustration inside queer picture tradition. Borrowing from Judith Butler’s notion of “gender trouble,” Julian traces how visible markers as soon as tied to political solidarity have been absorbed, recoded, and circulated as cultural capital. In this context, the feminist axiom “the personal is political” is strained towards one thing extra extractive, the place the physique itself turns into a web site of trade.

Within modern queer pictures, symbols equivalent to top-surgery scars and binders typically operate as legible markers of id, but in addition as commodities. Julian’s photos, together with images of his personal burns, confront this stress instantly. They acknowledge the pressures of visibility and circulation whereas holding onto the lived, non-public actuality of bodily autonomy and launch.

Across the exhibition, recognition arrives with a sort of unease. Each picture holds the hint of rupture alongside the potential of transformation. What emerges is just not decision, however an area the place affirmation insists, even within the shadow of violence.

About Res Julian

Res Tahan Julian is an artist and educator based mostly in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Res graduated with a BA in Sociology and Studio Art from Smith College, an MFA from the Yale School of Art and a post-master’s in curatorial research from CuratorLab at Konstfack University in Stockholm, Sweden. He is an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and his work has been supported by residencies at BAXTER ST, Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, receiving grants from the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University and the Swedish Arts Grant Committee.

Res was shortlisted for a Lucie Foundation Scholarship, acquired a Saatchi Art Rising Star Award and his e book Towers of Thanks, printed in 2017 by Loose Joints, was a finalist forthe Lucie Photo Book Prize.