SLQS Gallery presents I Know Who I Am By Being With You, an exhibition of early works by trans non-binary photographer Bex Wade, which captures New York’s queer nightlife in the early 2010s, and marks Wade’s first solo show. The exhibition is through May 17th.
Starting out in the underground club scenes in the UK and New York, Wade documented queer nightlife as a radical space of expression. Later, they turned their lens to the streets, capturing global Pride movements and acts of protest. With a background in performance, they approach image-making as a dialogue between bodies and space, capturing movement and energy as it plays out across a make-shift stage, be it the dancefloor or the street.
Wade’s documentation of spaces of queer gathering archive moments where LGBTQIA+ people come together to celebrate, resist and redefine belonging. For Wade, “these images are an offering – to remember, to reclaim, and to carry forward the legacy of our collective becoming.”
Arriving in New York in 2010, Wade spent years living in the city seeking out spaces where queerness, gender fluidity and community could be explored without constraint. Their lens became an extension of that search, capturing the underground dance floors where self-expression reigned supreme. From Brooklyn warehouse Pride parties to the infamous Van Dam at Greenhouse, and the extravagant spectacles of Susanne Bartsch and Amanda Lepore’s Bloody Mary, each photograph pulses with the unfiltered exuberance of a time and place that can never be replicated.
I Know Who I Am By Being With You is a meditation on performance as an art form and as a survival strategy. The nightclub becomes a stage where identity is not just expressed but constructed, negotiated and reimagined with every movement. Wade’s lens captures this ritual of queer becoming, the way bodies transform under the lights, the defiant theatrics of self-presentation, the silent exchanges that signal belonging. These moments are ephemeral, yet their impact lingers, shaping what it means to be seen.
“This work is a love letter to the queer nights that held me. Under the strobes and amongst the sweat, we found each other. We made ourselves visible, irrepressible, undeniable.” – Bex Wade |
