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 sits at the center of Cig Harvey's Fall Table is a question of strategy as much as a yellow apple. The table is a stage — battered kitchen wood lifted out of any room by a near-black ground — and across it she distributes the season's debris with the even, considered spacing of a typology: pine spray, a bare branch laid like a rule, pinecones, a split seed pod, a sawn disc of pale wood, dried mushrooms, a burst of milkweed, a scatter of orange and chartreuse berry. This is the constructed image working in the register of the tabletop tableau, the genre that has let photographers from Laura Letinsky onward use arrangement itself as content.
The intelligence here is in how the picture positions found nature as deliberate display. Harvey borrows the cataloguing posture of botanical photography — the specimen-tray logic of Blossfeldt or Atkins — but declines its neutrality. Each spent thing is given its own pool of light and its own interval, so the grid reads less as science than as a curatorial act: she has decided what belongs and where. The apple anchors the composition without explaining it, a still-life center of gravity that keeps the eye circling.
That refusal to resolve is what makes the work contemporary rather than nostalgic. Rooted on the Maine coast and held in serious collections and monographs, Harvey treats the ground outside her Rockport door as raw material for a staged proposition — autumn not described but assembled, the windfall brought in and authored.
What sits at the center of Cig Harvey's Fall Table is a question of strategy as much as a yellow apple. The table is a stage — battered kitchen wood lifted out of any room by a near-black ground — and across it she distributes the season's debris with the even, considered spacing of a typology: pine spray, a bare branch laid like a rule, pinecones, a split seed pod, a sawn disc of pale wood, dried mushrooms, a burst of milkweed, a scatter of orange and chartreuse berry. This is the constructed image working in the register of the tabletop tableau, the genre that has let photographers from Laura Letinsky onward use arrangement itself as content.
The intelligence here is in how the picture positions found nature as deliberate display. Harvey borrows the cataloguing posture of botanical photography — the specimen-tray logic of Blossfeldt or Atkins — but declines its neutrality. Each spent thing is given its own pool of light and its own interval, so the grid reads less as science than as a curatorial act: she has decided what belongs and where. The apple anchors the composition without explaining it, a still-life center of gravity that keeps the eye circling.
That refusal to resolve is what makes the work contemporary rather than nostalgic. Rooted on the Maine coast and held in serious collections and monographs, Harvey treats the ground outside her Rockport door as raw material for a staged proposition — autumn not described but assembled, the windfall brought in and authored.