The Art of Intimacy: ‘Close Encounters’ at Smith Studio

A catalogue essay for Close Encounters at Smith Studio, July 2018.

“From bedroom scenes to scenes of violence, from subject to substrate, and then through scale, the theme of intimacy follows disparate threads. Yet the works exhibited all share the same vulnerability. Something previously hidden is revealed: a secret spoken aloud, a memory described, a dark dream recalled. Such is intimacy, a word bound not to love nor to the erotic. But rather, a word that denotes a certain knowledge, a privileged insight into the private life of another – another figure, another object, another place. Where some intimacies are lasting, others are only momentary; where some are apparent, others are not. ‘Is the intimacy felt at the cinema,’ the artist Michaela Younge asks, ‘an intimacy shared with the strangers in the darkness, or an intimacy with the darkness itself?’”

Read the full essay here.