Drawing from the male-dominated history of straight photography, Molly Matalon's pictures have a seductive clarity that evokes how our perceptions are sharpened in the excitement of an erotic encounter, and how those encounters are packaged and marketed back to us. But the intimacy being proffered by the subject, or conjured by the artist, is rarely explicitly sexual: rather it is quiet, vulnerable, tenderly perverse, akin to the tentative probing of someone seeking closeness rather than a confident recounting of conquests by someone who has found it.

The pictures are a reciprocal performance: the chance for the artist to create a close atmosphere with a sitter under the pretext of making a picture, and a chance for that sitter to express their hope to be desired by a future audience. It is a collection less about the friction of bodies, which are often formally isolated in her compositions, than about the vivid and vivifying frisson of encounter. — Nich McElroy