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.
There was a long stretch of the last century when every provincial parlor kept a painting like this one on its wall: a loose oil of pink and white roses spilling from a vase, signed in a cursive no one could quite read. Cig Harvey has taken such a canvas and raised it in front of a woman’s face, her bare arms bracketing the frame where her head should be. The painted bouquet becomes the sitter. She has traded her features for a genre.
The exchange is cleverer than a joke about art history. Notice what she wears: a dress printed with the same roses, pale blooms scattered across the bodice and skirt, so that the painting, the fabric, and the flower fold into one another until it is hard to say which is the copy of which. Photography here does what it does best, flattening a real body and a reproduced painting into a single tissue of surfaces. The signature in the lower corner insists on a maker; the picture asks whether anyone is behind it.
Harvey, based on the coast of Maine and here working in St Petersburg, has built a career on this slippage between the domestic and the strange, gathered in books such as You an Orchestra a Bomb and held in American museums. The archival pigment print suits the conceit precisely, rendering the oil’s brushy impasto and the dress’s soft print in the same even register, so the eye keeps mistaking one for the other. The woman is present and absent at once, offering us all the roses and withholding herself.
There was a long stretch of the last century when every provincial parlor kept a painting like this one on its wall: a loose oil of pink and white roses spilling from a vase, signed in a cursive no one could quite read. Cig Harvey has taken such a canvas and raised it in front of a woman’s face, her bare arms bracketing the frame where her head should be. The painted bouquet becomes the sitter. She has traded her features for a genre.
The exchange is cleverer than a joke about art history. Notice what she wears: a dress printed with the same roses, pale blooms scattered across the bodice and skirt, so that the painting, the fabric, and the flower fold into one another until it is hard to say which is the copy of which. Photography here does what it does best, flattening a real body and a reproduced painting into a single tissue of surfaces. The signature in the lower corner insists on a maker; the picture asks whether anyone is behind it.
Harvey, based on the coast of Maine and here working in St Petersburg, has built a career on this slippage between the domestic and the strange, gathered in books such as You an Orchestra a Bomb and held in American museums. The archival pigment print suits the conceit precisely, rendering the oil’s brushy impasto and the dress’s soft print in the same even register, so the eye keeps mistaking one for the other. The woman is present and absent at once, offering us all the roses and withholding herself.