The Greenhouse (Kale and Poppies), Hope, Maine, 2020
Archival Pigment Print.
40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 x 20 in
76.2 x 101.6 cm / 30 x 40 in
106.7 x 142.2 cm / 42 x 56 in
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.
White arrives in this picture as a material rather than a color: spun garden fleece, its filaments matted like frost, hung the full height of a greenhouse in Hope, Maine. The camera gives the fabric a biography — stitched seams running toward the ground, folds gathering where it slumps across the beds, green light from the misted panes sinking into its weave. Under the veil the garden goes soft. Kale becomes a dark green weather; poppies persist only as two pink stains floating in the mesh.
One bloom refuses the arrangement. At the left edge a magenta poppy has found an opening and pushed through into perfect focus, petals crumpled like tissue paper. It is hard not to read the fleece photographically: a translucent membrane interposed between light and matter, rendering the world as latency, blur, promise. The poppy that breaches it behaves like an image in developer, rising out of whiteness into fact. Even the condensation beading the glass above supplies the chemistry, a darkroom humidity transposed to horticulture.
Cig Harvey, who lives and works in nearby Rockport, has built a sensory, domestic lyric from exactly such encounters — gardens, fruit, fog, family — gathered in books like The Blue Notebook and Blue Violet and collected by museums across the United States. This archival pigment print serves the subject with unusual aptness: pigment resting on the paper’s surface, fiber describing fiber, so the fleece’s tangled filaments and the drowned greens beneath keep their tactile specificity. A photograph about a membrane, printed, appropriately, as a skin.
White arrives in this picture as a material rather than a color: spun garden fleece, its filaments matted like frost, hung the full height of a greenhouse in Hope, Maine. The camera gives the fabric a biography — stitched seams running toward the ground, folds gathering where it slumps across the beds, green light from the misted panes sinking into its weave. Under the veil the garden goes soft. Kale becomes a dark green weather; poppies persist only as two pink stains floating in the mesh.
One bloom refuses the arrangement. At the left edge a magenta poppy has found an opening and pushed through into perfect focus, petals crumpled like tissue paper. It is hard not to read the fleece photographically: a translucent membrane interposed between light and matter, rendering the world as latency, blur, promise. The poppy that breaches it behaves like an image in developer, rising out of whiteness into fact. Even the condensation beading the glass above supplies the chemistry, a darkroom humidity transposed to horticulture.
Cig Harvey, who lives and works in nearby Rockport, has built a sensory, domestic lyric from exactly such encounters — gardens, fruit, fog, family — gathered in books like The Blue Notebook and Blue Violet and collected by museums across the United States. This archival pigment print serves the subject with unusual aptness: pigment resting on the paper’s surface, fiber describing fiber, so the fleece’s tangled filaments and the drowned greens beneath keep their tactile specificity. A photograph about a membrane, printed, appropriately, as a skin.