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.
The light is failing, and that is the picture’s real subject. A dusk so low it turns the leaves to near-black lets the quince blossoms burn at their reddest, each flower lit from within as daylight drains. Into this half-dark a woman stands in a red dress, so nearly the color of the flowers that she is half-swallowed by them. Only her mouth and bare shoulders surface; a blurred cluster of crimson petals crosses her face, and the weather of the hour does the concealing.
There is something faintly disquieting in a beauty this total. To camouflage a face in flowers is to make the woman decorative, to hand her over to the bush, and the image knows it. The red is seductive and also a little suffocating; the tangled thorned branches latticing the frame keep it from mere prettiness. We are offered a fairy tale — the maiden in the thicket — and the low light insists we notice the menace folded inside the enchantment, the cost the loveliness quietly exacts.
Cig Harvey made this in Hope, Maine, and the title gives the woman a name, Ashley, restoring the individuality the flowers try to dissolve. Author of Blue Violet and You an Orchestra a Bomb, she has built a career on this exact edge, where domestic tenderness borders on the uncanny. Issued as an archival pigment print, the image sustains its deep reds against the near-black surround without the shadows going dead or the crimson flaring out of control. Widely collected by American museums, she leaves us unsure whether we are watching someone bloom or disappear.
The light is failing, and that is the picture’s real subject. A dusk so low it turns the leaves to near-black lets the quince blossoms burn at their reddest, each flower lit from within as daylight drains. Into this half-dark a woman stands in a red dress, so nearly the color of the flowers that she is half-swallowed by them. Only her mouth and bare shoulders surface; a blurred cluster of crimson petals crosses her face, and the weather of the hour does the concealing.
There is something faintly disquieting in a beauty this total. To camouflage a face in flowers is to make the woman decorative, to hand her over to the bush, and the image knows it. The red is seductive and also a little suffocating; the tangled thorned branches latticing the frame keep it from mere prettiness. We are offered a fairy tale — the maiden in the thicket — and the low light insists we notice the menace folded inside the enchantment, the cost the loveliness quietly exacts.
Cig Harvey made this in Hope, Maine, and the title gives the woman a name, Ashley, restoring the individuality the flowers try to dissolve. Author of Blue Violet and You an Orchestra a Bomb, she has built a career on this exact edge, where domestic tenderness borders on the uncanny. Issued as an archival pigment print, the image sustains its deep reds against the near-black surround without the shadows going dead or the crimson flaring out of control. Widely collected by American museums, she leaves us unsure whether we are watching someone bloom or disappear.