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.
Where did dinner go? A fork is out, gripped in a small fist with the tines to the table, more digging tool than etiquette, but the plate, if there ever was one, has been eclipsed by a black Sony screen, and the meal being consumed is whatever is playing on it. Only the top of the child’s head clears the lid. The eyes, lit from below by a pale electronic glow, peer over it like Kilroy over his wall: present, watchful, not entirely here.
Around that small drama, an enormous amount of nothing. The dark wood paneling takes up most of the frame, vertical ridge after vertical ridge, brown deepening to black, so the room feels less like a dining room than a church built by people who took dinner seriously. All that Puritan woodwork, and down at the bottom edge a child being quietly raptured by a screen no bigger than a placemat. The joke is gentle but it lands. So does the tenderness, which arrives a beat later, the way tenderness tends to.
The artist has spent years photographing family life on the Maine coast, in color that runs sensuous and strange: fog, fruit, gardens, the domestic pitched toward fable. Books like The Blue Notebook and You an Orchestra a Bomb have carried that vision into museum collections across the United States. This archival pigment print holds its blacks the way the paneled room holds its secret: generously, keeping one small bright face at the bottom of all that dark.
Where did dinner go? A fork is out, gripped in a small fist with the tines to the table, more digging tool than etiquette, but the plate, if there ever was one, has been eclipsed by a black Sony screen, and the meal being consumed is whatever is playing on it. Only the top of the child’s head clears the lid. The eyes, lit from below by a pale electronic glow, peer over it like Kilroy over his wall: present, watchful, not entirely here.
Around that small drama, an enormous amount of nothing. The dark wood paneling takes up most of the frame, vertical ridge after vertical ridge, brown deepening to black, so the room feels less like a dining room than a church built by people who took dinner seriously. All that Puritan woodwork, and down at the bottom edge a child being quietly raptured by a screen no bigger than a placemat. The joke is gentle but it lands. So does the tenderness, which arrives a beat later, the way tenderness tends to.
The artist has spent years photographing family life on the Maine coast, in color that runs sensuous and strange: fog, fruit, gardens, the domestic pitched toward fable. Books like The Blue Notebook and You an Orchestra a Bomb have carried that vision into museum collections across the United States. This archival pigment print holds its blacks the way the paneled room holds its secret: generously, keeping one small bright face at the bottom of all that dark.