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.
Cig Harvey makes photographs you seem to feel before you finish seeing them. A British-born artist long settled on the coast of Maine, she has built, across acclaimed books such as You Look at Me Like an Emergency and Blue Violet, a body of work devoted to the sensuous, the seasonal and the everyday sublime — colour raised to the pitch of emotion, the domestic world charged with wonder and unease.
Poppies (Exploding) is a still life that will not sit still. A figure in dark clothing all but vanishes behind an enormous armful of poppies — scarlet, orange and a single, insistent yellow — their long stems flung outward against a near-black ground until the bouquet seems to detonate out of the dark. The face is hidden; the flowers speak in its place, at once a gift, a shield and a small, controlled explosion of life.
Harvey works in the great lineage of the memento mori, where beauty and transience are inseparable, but she renders it in saturated, contemporary colour rather than sober shadow. The poppy — emblem of sleep, memory and brief, blazing bloom — is the perfect vehicle: gorgeous and already passing. What lingers is the sense of attention as a form of joy, even of survival: the conviction that the world, looked at hard enough and loved enough, can overwhelm. Tender, theatrical and faintly vertiginous, it is the kind of image that turns a wall into a window, and a fleeting armful of flowers into something that feels, improbably, like a confession. Harvey is also a writer, and her images carry a poet's compression; each is a held breath, a sentence made of colour.
Cig Harvey makes photographs you seem to feel before you finish seeing them. A British-born artist long settled on the coast of Maine, she has built, across acclaimed books such as You Look at Me Like an Emergency and Blue Violet, a body of work devoted to the sensuous, the seasonal and the everyday sublime — colour raised to the pitch of emotion, the domestic world charged with wonder and unease.
Poppies (Exploding) is a still life that will not sit still. A figure in dark clothing all but vanishes behind an enormous armful of poppies — scarlet, orange and a single, insistent yellow — their long stems flung outward against a near-black ground until the bouquet seems to detonate out of the dark. The face is hidden; the flowers speak in its place, at once a gift, a shield and a small, controlled explosion of life.
Harvey works in the great lineage of the memento mori, where beauty and transience are inseparable, but she renders it in saturated, contemporary colour rather than sober shadow. The poppy — emblem of sleep, memory and brief, blazing bloom — is the perfect vehicle: gorgeous and already passing. What lingers is the sense of attention as a form of joy, even of survival: the conviction that the world, looked at hard enough and loved enough, can overwhelm. Tender, theatrical and faintly vertiginous, it is the kind of image that turns a wall into a window, and a fleeting armful of flowers into something that feels, improbably, like a confession. Harvey is also a writer, and her images carry a poet's compression; each is a held breath, a sentence made of colour.