NEW YORK — Artist Ryan McGinley's new exhibition, "Night Shift," is on view at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Soho. This marks his first exhibition in New York in eight years.

The "Night Shift" series consists of photographs taken between 9:00 PM and 5:00 AM, predominantly featuring queer models. McGinley started the project approximately one year ago during the cherry blossom season. One photograph in the series was taken in the bowl of Central Park's Bethesda Fountain; McGinley confirmed this setting was an intentional reference to the play "Angels in America."

"We're creating something that's beautiful, which feels political to me," McGinley said. "I want to photograph what it's like to be alive, and to be in the moment, and to not take life for granted." During the project, McGinley encountered police once while shooting a car wash near the West Side Highway. He stated that officers questioned his artistic endeavors, yelling, "You call this art?"

In 2003, McGinley had a solo exhibition titled "The Kids Are Alright" at the Whitney Museum of American Art when he was twenty-five years old. McGinley grew up in northern New Jersey in a middle-class Irish Catholic family and is the youngest of eight children. His older brother, Michael, was an artist and an openly gay man who introduced McGinley to artists Keith Haring and Andy Warhol. Michael McGinley died in 1995 at the age of thirty-four from AIDS. "I think about my brother as an angel a lot. He's protecting me," McGinley said.