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.
What the screen keeps from us is the face, though the face is right there, close enough to breathe on the mesh. A fine grid of wire covers everything, and behind it a person leans in until features gather and then refuse to resolve, the skin lit an improbable magenta, the eyes lost in shadow. Only the hand comes through with any certainty, pale fingers splayed and pressed flat against the wire, as if testing whether the barrier is glass or air. We are shown the reaching, not the one who reaches.
A screen door is a democratic thing, common to porches from Warren to Lagos, made to let the evening in while holding the insects out. Here it becomes a membrane between being seen and staying hidden. The forearm emerges into full light, muscular and near, while the mouth blurs into a smear of violet and the rest recedes into brown dark. To look is to feel the small shame of looking: this is someone at a threshold, neither inside nor out, and the picture declines to grant us the intimacy the pose seems to promise.
Cig Harvey, working from midcoast Maine, has made a body of work in which houses, gardens and family become instruments for registering desire and dread; her books The Blue Notebook and Blue Violet are held in American museum collections. This image belongs to her darker register, closer to apparition than portrait. Printed as an archival pigment print, it holds the metallic grain of the mesh and the sudden electric purple without letting either overwhelm the deep, patient blacks that surround the hand.
What the screen keeps from us is the face, though the face is right there, close enough to breathe on the mesh. A fine grid of wire covers everything, and behind it a person leans in until features gather and then refuse to resolve, the skin lit an improbable magenta, the eyes lost in shadow. Only the hand comes through with any certainty, pale fingers splayed and pressed flat against the wire, as if testing whether the barrier is glass or air. We are shown the reaching, not the one who reaches.
A screen door is a democratic thing, common to porches from Warren to Lagos, made to let the evening in while holding the insects out. Here it becomes a membrane between being seen and staying hidden. The forearm emerges into full light, muscular and near, while the mouth blurs into a smear of violet and the rest recedes into brown dark. To look is to feel the small shame of looking: this is someone at a threshold, neither inside nor out, and the picture declines to grant us the intimacy the pose seems to promise.
Cig Harvey, working from midcoast Maine, has made a body of work in which houses, gardens and family become instruments for registering desire and dread; her books The Blue Notebook and Blue Violet are held in American museum collections. This image belongs to her darker register, closer to apparition than portrait. Printed as an archival pigment print, it holds the metallic grain of the mesh and the sudden electric purple without letting either overwhelm the deep, patient blacks that surround the hand.