Juliet Jacobson is a tall, modest 30-year-old woman originally from Pullyallup, Washington who draws pictures of naked boys. Not just naked, actually, but touching themselves, touching each other, fucking each other. If you ask her how she started on the boys, she'll tell you it happened when she fell in love.

Love is not prosaic for Jacobson—it is emotionally difficult and theoretically knotty. Primarily, she recalls, she was obsessed with the fear of her boyfriend's death. Her discovery of this feeling drove her to examine the links between morbidity and adoration, which eventually manifested in her work as memento mori like moths and skulls surrounding her figures, which are love objects in and of themselves. Here recognition of the fragility of the body is itself a sign of love: worry in this case indicating its opposite, that one wants to preserve the object in question. But the relationship between a self and other is inherently violent; just ask Hegel. Then again, violence, or the capability of violence, is also the foundation of tenderness; just ask Bataille.

In practical terms of course, the internal contradictions of love are coupled with real-world threats from without. Jacobson represents these unknowable difficulties in the form of various snakes. "They are alien," she says. "They don't have faces you could love on." But problems can frequently bring one closer to ones' lovers in the final analysis, much as snakes are both venomous animals and generative phallic symbols. In Jacobson's work, all of these ideas and contradictions meet in and around exacting, life-size renderings of men.

That they are life-size is an important detail for Jacobson. In this way, they are matched to the size of viewers, or maybe to viewers' lovers. She also draws every detail by hand, so that all parts of the work are touched, caressed. But her men aren't pure objects, ready to be desired. They sometimes have agendas of their own, or in other words make out or fuck. This is a nod partly to Jacobson's source material ("physique" magazines of the 60s and 70s), partly to confuse the boundaries between self and other (does not an experience of the petit mort break the boundaries at least of inside and outside?), and partly to the doubling of Narcissus. The mirrored drawings, too, refer back to doubles, here reflecting—yuk yuk—the Cartesian split of body and soul.

In very few pictures, Jacobson actually uses no figures at all. One of her most striking, I'll Do Anything You Say, shows two skulls, with a snake entwined through both and a rose between them, beneath a lace-covered crescent moon. "Love is like death," she explains, "in that it is the positive valuation of life in the face of the inexorability of death. What I have pictured is my own dead skull staring eternally into another made in memoriam to a lover of future imaging."

Jacobson's drawings aren't all myth and theory—there's an ample amount of simple sex too, at least on a surface level. And not everyone can stomach it: in the fall of 2007, curator Astria Suparak was dismissed from Syracuse University's Warehouse Gallery immediately before launching a show that included Jacobson's work. Fortunately, her momentum is gathering in other areas: Jacobson will hold a two-person show with Marlene McCarty at Ritter/Zamet, London, in November.

The Phenomenology of Hot: Juliet Jacobson