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.
Every celebration ends at the compost heap, and here the leftovers of one arrive together: dahlias cut for a table and cakes iced for a party, tipped out onto the same ground to rot. The camera looks straight down, flattening the pile into a field that fills the frame edge to edge. There is no horizon, no sky, no near or far — only the mingled debris of pleasure, seen from directly above as if we had walked up and looked down at our feet.
What holds it together is the vantage and the color. A pink layer cake with a piped border sits at lower left; a lavender one crowns the upper right; between them lie a sprinkled doughnut, a wedge of red velvet, two macarons, and a slice fanned with rainbow confetti — each sweet a small event inside the larger drift of magenta, cream, and orange blooms. The picture refuses a center. The eye wanders, catching on the manufactured sugar as it surfaces among the wilting, wholly natural flowers.
Cig Harvey, based in Rockport, Maine, has spent her books — You an Orchestra a Bomb, Blue Violet — pressing sweetness until it turns to something graver, and this is that instinct laid out as evidence. The overhead survey borrows from still-life painting’s memento mori while keeping the plainness of a photograph of the actual ground. Printed as an archival pigment print, it carries an implausible density of hue without the reds and purples bleeding into one another. Held in American museum collections, she lets abundance and decay share a single frame, and neither wins.
Every celebration ends at the compost heap, and here the leftovers of one arrive together: dahlias cut for a table and cakes iced for a party, tipped out onto the same ground to rot. The camera looks straight down, flattening the pile into a field that fills the frame edge to edge. There is no horizon, no sky, no near or far — only the mingled debris of pleasure, seen from directly above as if we had walked up and looked down at our feet.
What holds it together is the vantage and the color. A pink layer cake with a piped border sits at lower left; a lavender one crowns the upper right; between them lie a sprinkled doughnut, a wedge of red velvet, two macarons, and a slice fanned with rainbow confetti — each sweet a small event inside the larger drift of magenta, cream, and orange blooms. The picture refuses a center. The eye wanders, catching on the manufactured sugar as it surfaces among the wilting, wholly natural flowers.
Cig Harvey, based in Rockport, Maine, has spent her books — You an Orchestra a Bomb, Blue Violet — pressing sweetness until it turns to something graver, and this is that instinct laid out as evidence. The overhead survey borrows from still-life painting’s memento mori while keeping the plainness of a photograph of the actual ground. Printed as an archival pigment print, it carries an implausible density of hue without the reds and purples bleeding into one another. Held in American museum collections, she lets abundance and decay share a single frame, and neither wins.