Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph.
On the dry side of a pane of glass, close enough that its sweat fills the frame, we watch the azaleas arrive from the other side, pressing their magenta faces into the mist. Where a petal or a dark leaf touches, the image snaps sharp; where it leans back an inch, it dissolves into pink vapor. Beaded condensation stipples the whole surface, and a runnel of water has cut a clear diagonal track near the bottom corner. The picture plane is suddenly literal: a cold sheet you could lay a palm against.
The title’s verb is the key to the work. Pressing, as in a flower press, as in a body against a window: the botanical and the sensual held in one word. Harvey operates in the directorial register without building sets; she stages encounters with what is already there, then lets weather do the art direction. The condensation performs like a scrim, or like chiffon over a lens, fashion’s old trick of veiling to intensify. So the photograph reads three ways at once: still life, weather report, portrait of longing, the flowers wanting in or us wanting out.
Harvey, British-born and long settled in Rockport, Maine, has built a sensory, domestic body of work in color, gathered in books such as You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet and collected by museums across the United States. The archival pigment print is the right instrument for this double condition, holding each beaded droplet in razor detail while the pink pools and drifts like dye in water. It is a cool object about heat.
On the dry side of a pane of glass, close enough that its sweat fills the frame, we watch the azaleas arrive from the other side, pressing their magenta faces into the mist. Where a petal or a dark leaf touches, the image snaps sharp; where it leans back an inch, it dissolves into pink vapor. Beaded condensation stipples the whole surface, and a runnel of water has cut a clear diagonal track near the bottom corner. The picture plane is suddenly literal: a cold sheet you could lay a palm against.
The title’s verb is the key to the work. Pressing, as in a flower press, as in a body against a window: the botanical and the sensual held in one word. Harvey operates in the directorial register without building sets; she stages encounters with what is already there, then lets weather do the art direction. The condensation performs like a scrim, or like chiffon over a lens, fashion’s old trick of veiling to intensify. So the photograph reads three ways at once: still life, weather report, portrait of longing, the flowers wanting in or us wanting out.
Harvey, British-born and long settled in Rockport, Maine, has built a sensory, domestic body of work in color, gathered in books such as You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet and collected by museums across the United States. The archival pigment print is the right instrument for this double condition, holding each beaded droplet in razor detail while the pink pools and drifts like dye in water. It is a cool object about heat.