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.
Heaping upward and folding back on itself, the cloud crowds the frame to every edge, leaving no horizon, no ground, nothing to tell us which way is up. Cig Harvey has tilted her lens into pure weather and held it there. The upper reaches soften into a flat dove grey; lower and to the right, a bank of cumulus swells forward, its rounded shoulders catching a warm cream-and-peach light while the hollows beneath it fall to mauve. The whole mass seems caught mid-breath, still rising.
Photographs of clouds carry a long charge. When Stieglitz aimed his camera at the sky and called the results Equivalents, he wanted a picture that answered to feeling rather than fact, a form with no scale and no address. Harvey’s cloud works the same register, though her palette is warmer, tuned to the blush of early or failing light. Read slowly, the tonal transitions do the labor: cream giving to grey, grey deepening to shadowed lilac, each passage so gradual the eye cannot find the seam where one becomes the next.
Harvey, based on the coast of Maine, is known for color that runs toward the sensory and the domestic, the gardens and fog of books such as The Blue Notebook and Blue Violet, and here she lets that sensibility loose on the least domestic subject of all. The archival pigment print is the right vehicle for it, able to carry these close-valued creams and greys without banding, so the softest gradations stay intact. What remains is the feeling of standing inside weather, looking up as the sky rearranges itself.
Heaping upward and folding back on itself, the cloud crowds the frame to every edge, leaving no horizon, no ground, nothing to tell us which way is up. Cig Harvey has tilted her lens into pure weather and held it there. The upper reaches soften into a flat dove grey; lower and to the right, a bank of cumulus swells forward, its rounded shoulders catching a warm cream-and-peach light while the hollows beneath it fall to mauve. The whole mass seems caught mid-breath, still rising.
Photographs of clouds carry a long charge. When Stieglitz aimed his camera at the sky and called the results Equivalents, he wanted a picture that answered to feeling rather than fact, a form with no scale and no address. Harvey’s cloud works the same register, though her palette is warmer, tuned to the blush of early or failing light. Read slowly, the tonal transitions do the labor: cream giving to grey, grey deepening to shadowed lilac, each passage so gradual the eye cannot find the seam where one becomes the next.
Harvey, based on the coast of Maine, is known for color that runs toward the sensory and the domestic, the gardens and fog of books such as The Blue Notebook and Blue Violet, and here she lets that sensibility loose on the least domestic subject of all. The archival pigment print is the right vehicle for it, able to carry these close-valued creams and greys without banding, so the softest gradations stay intact. What remains is the feeling of standing inside weather, looking up as the sky rearranges itself.