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.
The picture won’t tell you whether these butterflies are alive. Five of them are spread across a white wall, wings flat and open in the way of things pinned in a case, and yet nothing pins them; there are no shadows of glass, no labels, just a painted wall speckled with marks and a thin stem of red flowers reaching up from the plants below. Alive, they would be a small miracle of stillness. Dead, they would be a display. The image keeps its verdict to itself.
What it does give you is an improbable arrangement of color against near-emptiness. A big iridescent blue morpho in the top corner, a yellow-and-black swallowtail below it, a smaller orange one further down, another blue at the lower right, each holding its patch of wall like guests who have arrived at a party and spaced themselves out of shyness. Green leaves crowd the bottom edge. The white between them does most of the work, the way a page does, giving each creature room to be looked at one at a time.
Cig Harvey has spent years turning the garden into a place where beauty and mortality keep brushing against each other, a preoccupation running through books like You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet and into American museum collections. This is her subject in miniature: loveliness you cannot quite trust. Printed as an archival pigment print, the picture holds that field of white without it going chalky, so the blue really flares and the smallest wing keeps its edges, suspended between a garden and a diagram.
The picture won’t tell you whether these butterflies are alive. Five of them are spread across a white wall, wings flat and open in the way of things pinned in a case, and yet nothing pins them; there are no shadows of glass, no labels, just a painted wall speckled with marks and a thin stem of red flowers reaching up from the plants below. Alive, they would be a small miracle of stillness. Dead, they would be a display. The image keeps its verdict to itself.
What it does give you is an improbable arrangement of color against near-emptiness. A big iridescent blue morpho in the top corner, a yellow-and-black swallowtail below it, a smaller orange one further down, another blue at the lower right, each holding its patch of wall like guests who have arrived at a party and spaced themselves out of shyness. Green leaves crowd the bottom edge. The white between them does most of the work, the way a page does, giving each creature room to be looked at one at a time.
Cig Harvey has spent years turning the garden into a place where beauty and mortality keep brushing against each other, a preoccupation running through books like You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet and into American museum collections. This is her subject in miniature: loveliness you cannot quite trust. Printed as an archival pigment print, the picture holds that field of white without it going chalky, so the blue really flares and the smallest wing keeps its edges, suspended between a garden and a diagram.