Behind Closed Doors: Groupshow featuring Michael Bailey-Gates, Matt Lipps, Pacifico Silano, Christopher Smith, Michael Young

In the face of similar pressures, the work of American artist Michael Bailey-Gates establishes a space of joyous affirmation – where gender binaries and heteronormative conventions dissolve into distant memory. In their images, the artist poses for exuberant portraits with a playful cast of friends, toying with the scope and limits of viewers’ expectations. Carefully-selected props, rather than elaborate digital post-processing techniques, offer Bailey-Gates’ work an added dimension. But beneath the riotous celebration lie more serious concerns – here, the camera is an essential tool for grappling identities and self-representation, whilst nudity becomes a powerful metaphor for the naked vulnerability of seeking acceptance.

Set against the noisy, riotous colour of Smith and Bailey-Gates' works, Pacifico Silano’s pieces carry quieter, weightier undertones, speaking deeply all the while to his own identity – and to that of a wider LGBTQ+ community. Spurred on by the erasure of his uncle’s story, who was lost to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Silano turned to gay pornographic magazines that preceded or aligned with this time period; the kind of images his uncle might have looked at. Rephotographing sections of the magazines as a foundation for new works, Silano highlights the tension between the sexual liberation of the 1970s and the tragic sense of loss that followed, as well as dissecting representations of an archetypal masculinity that the magazines proffered.