“The work of photographer Isabel Magowan is the subject of this issue of MATTE Magazine, a periodical with a specific interest in queer issues, and often dedicated to one artist per publication. Magowan, an American artist, has curated a selection of work informed by her background as a ballet dancer and child performer. Using brightly, sometimes harshly, lit spaces as backdrops for saturated images of costumed children and adults, Magowan creates a narrative of luxury and performance, melodrama and intimacy, with staged shots that explore familial, sexual, and theatrical relationships, often centered in domestic space. With an overarching interest in themes of fantasy, vanity, and escapism within her work, Magowan’s images are complemented by the writings of Sylvia McNamara and Zak Arctander included in this issue, which take as their subject the mysterious, the ghoulish, the private nature of childhood invention and innocence, as well as the loss thereof.”