Res Julian photography of Pulse nightclub 10 years later
BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York presents “True Hole,” debuted on June 17 and running through August 12, 2026, featuring lens-based works by 2025 BAXTER ST Resident Res Julian. The exhibition marks a decade-long response to the 2016 shooting at Pulse, a queer Latinx nightclub in Orlando, where 49 people were killed. “True Hole” opens 10 years after a privacy fence was erected around the site in the immediate aftermath.
That fence quickly became an informal memorial, as mourners filled its openings with flowers, flags, photographs, and personal objects. While such gaps are often required in construction fencing to allow visibility and maintain structural integrity, in Orlando their obstruction created a tension between collective grief and physical stability. The act of filling them risked compromising the barrier itself, threatening to expose the site it was meant to conceal.
The works in “True Hole” draw from fragments Julian began in 2016, now interwoven with recent self-portraits. Moving between what is seen and withheld, the images considerthe fence not only as a boundary, but as a demand: for access, for witnessing, for meaning that is both historical and deeply personal.
The exhibition also reflects on a shifting terrain of representation within queer image culture. Borrowing from Judith Butler’s notion of “gender trouble,” Julian traces how visual markers once 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 toward something more extractive, where the body itself becomes a site of exchange.
Within contemporary queer photography, symbols such as top-surgery scars and binders often function as legible markers of identity, but also as commodities. Julian’s images, including photographs of his own burns, confront this tension directly. They acknowledge the pressures of visibility and circulation while holding onto the lived, private reality of bodily autonomy and release.
Across the exhibition, recognition arrives with a kind of unease. Each image holds the trace of rupture alongside the possibility of transformation. What emerges is not resolution, but a space where affirmation insists, even in the shadow of violence.
About Res Julian
Res Tahan Julian is an artist and educator based 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 studies 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, received a Saatchi Art Rising Star Award and his book Towers of Thanks, published in 2017 by Loose Joints, was a finalist forthe Lucie Photo Book Prize.
