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.
We have reached a moment when the night sky, for many of us, is furnished more reliably by strings of small bulbs than by stars, and this photograph makes the substitution its subject. Look up, the picture says, and find not constellations but a canopy of fairy lights, warm gold and cold blue, threaded through bare branches over a fringe of black conifers. The deep cobalt of the sky pales to a bruised horizon-blue at the lower edge, where the silhouettes of firs anchor the whole invented heaven to the ground.
Harvey has judged her values with a printmaker’s care. The gold lights read as near stars, the blue ones as something colder and more electric, and between them the branches draw a nervous, crisscrossing geometry across the frame. There is no horizon line proper, only the ragged treetops; the eye, given nowhere to rest, wanders the whole grid the way it once wandered actual skies. It is festive and faintly melancholy at once, a wonder we have wired ourselves rather than waited for.
British-born and settled on the coast of Maine, Harvey has spent a career finding the extraordinary in the seasonal and the near-at-hand, across books such as Blue Violet and You an Orchestra a Bomb and in the collections of American museums. The archival pigment print is well suited to a picture built almost entirely of points of colored light against dark; its deep, unbroken blacks and clean chromatic separation keep the thousands of bulbs from smearing into haze. One holds it and looks up out of habit.
We have reached a moment when the night sky, for many of us, is furnished more reliably by strings of small bulbs than by stars, and this photograph makes the substitution its subject. Look up, the picture says, and find not constellations but a canopy of fairy lights, warm gold and cold blue, threaded through bare branches over a fringe of black conifers. The deep cobalt of the sky pales to a bruised horizon-blue at the lower edge, where the silhouettes of firs anchor the whole invented heaven to the ground.
Harvey has judged her values with a printmaker’s care. The gold lights read as near stars, the blue ones as something colder and more electric, and between them the branches draw a nervous, crisscrossing geometry across the frame. There is no horizon line proper, only the ragged treetops; the eye, given nowhere to rest, wanders the whole grid the way it once wandered actual skies. It is festive and faintly melancholy at once, a wonder we have wired ourselves rather than waited for.
British-born and settled on the coast of Maine, Harvey has spent a career finding the extraordinary in the seasonal and the near-at-hand, across books such as Blue Violet and You an Orchestra a Bomb and in the collections of American museums. The archival pigment print is well suited to a picture built almost entirely of points of colored light against dark; its deep, unbroken blacks and clean chromatic separation keep the thousands of bulbs from smearing into haze. One holds it and looks up out of habit.