New Annual - Night Flowers: Damien Frost

Damien Frost opens Night Flowers at Watt Space Gallery on Friday 25 September, the first of a run that holds through to 30 September and then picks up from 1 to 4 October. It's part of New Annual, the gallery's ongoing series of artist residencies.

Night Flowers brings together a collection of Frost's iconic and provocative work, an invitation into the theatricality of queer nightlife where art, performance and self-reinvention collide. The original series was shot over a decade in London by the Australian-born, London-based photographer, who captured the charged intimacy of late-night dancefloors and the streets around them. The resulting visceral portraits turn costume and gesture into living artworks about radical acts of identity.

What makes this particular showing different is the new material. The exhibition was developed through a residency at Watt Space Gallery as part of New Annual, and newly commissioned portraits of Newcastle's queer and alternative communities join the Night Flowers family for the very first time. Here, local identities are reimagined and defiantly declared alongside the London work, so the show is as much about this city as it is about the one Frost has spent the last decade documenting. Visitors are welcomed with a free glass of bubbles on arrival.

The gallery is at 20 Auckland St, Newcastle, 2300. The exhibition runs from 25 to 30 September, and then from 1 to 4 October.