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.
Some portraits are made by removing everything between us and the sitter; this one is made by piling things on. Pink rhododendron blossoms swarm across the frame, doubled and dissolved by a pane of glass, until the face behind them is only a soft suggestion of a cheek, a downcast eye, one clear ear at the right edge. The woman is present and overwritten at once, her likeness treated as another surface for the flowers to bloom against.
The picture is plainly constructed, and unashamed of it. Harvey has let the reflection do the compositing that a darkroom or a screen might otherwise perform, layering the blossoming shrub over the body so that a bare shoulder rises into the lower foreground, dusted with fallen petals like a scattering of dark confetti on the skin. Everything is staged toward saturation: the magenta clusters at left, the sunlit greens, the blush of shoulder. It reads as fashion image and reverie in the same breath, cool in its knowingness, warm in its palette.
Harvey, based in Rockport, Maine and widely collected by American museums, builds her books, among them Blue Violet and You an Orchestra a Bomb, from precisely this collision of the domestic garden and the sensory extreme. The directorial hand never hides; it invites you to admire the arrangement. Issued as an archival pigment print, the surface can carry that density of pink without muddying, holding the petals sharp where they touch skin and letting the face recede into pure atmosphere behind the glass.
Some portraits are made by removing everything between us and the sitter; this one is made by piling things on. Pink rhododendron blossoms swarm across the frame, doubled and dissolved by a pane of glass, until the face behind them is only a soft suggestion of a cheek, a downcast eye, one clear ear at the right edge. The woman is present and overwritten at once, her likeness treated as another surface for the flowers to bloom against.
The picture is plainly constructed, and unashamed of it. Harvey has let the reflection do the compositing that a darkroom or a screen might otherwise perform, layering the blossoming shrub over the body so that a bare shoulder rises into the lower foreground, dusted with fallen petals like a scattering of dark confetti on the skin. Everything is staged toward saturation: the magenta clusters at left, the sunlit greens, the blush of shoulder. It reads as fashion image and reverie in the same breath, cool in its knowingness, warm in its palette.
Harvey, based in Rockport, Maine and widely collected by American museums, builds her books, among them Blue Violet and You an Orchestra a Bomb, from precisely this collision of the domestic garden and the sensory extreme. The directorial hand never hides; it invites you to admire the arrangement. Issued as an archival pigment print, the surface can carry that density of pink without muddying, holding the petals sharp where they touch skin and letting the face recede into pure atmosphere behind the glass.