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.
For as long as there have been portraits, children have been sat down and handed an animal to hold still against, a pet standing in for the patience the child cannot supply. This picture inherits that long arrangement and quietly breaks it. The girl has turned her back on us. Her blonde curls fall over a cream cardigan, her white lace dress pools across the dark floor, and only the rabbit, pressed to her shoulder, keeps its face toward the room, one pink nose and two dark eyes meeting ours in her place.
The refusal is the subject. Against a wall of deep teal, that oceanic green particular to old plaster and Dutch painting, the child becomes an event of texture: the loose knit of the sweater, the ruffled hem, a flash of mint at the ankle. We are given her hair but not her face, her tenderness but not her expression. The rabbit accepts our looking so that she does not have to, and in that small division of labor the photograph declines the easy sentiment its ingredients might otherwise promise.
Cig Harvey lives on the Maine coast, and her long project, gathered in books such as You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet, treats family and household as the ground of a serious art now held in American museum collections. She is unafraid of beauty but distrustful of its shortcuts, and here she withholds the reassurance of a smiling face. Printed as an archival pigment print, the picture keeps that green at full depth and the white lace luminous, so the small figure seems set into enamel.
For as long as there have been portraits, children have been sat down and handed an animal to hold still against, a pet standing in for the patience the child cannot supply. This picture inherits that long arrangement and quietly breaks it. The girl has turned her back on us. Her blonde curls fall over a cream cardigan, her white lace dress pools across the dark floor, and only the rabbit, pressed to her shoulder, keeps its face toward the room, one pink nose and two dark eyes meeting ours in her place.
The refusal is the subject. Against a wall of deep teal, that oceanic green particular to old plaster and Dutch painting, the child becomes an event of texture: the loose knit of the sweater, the ruffled hem, a flash of mint at the ankle. We are given her hair but not her face, her tenderness but not her expression. The rabbit accepts our looking so that she does not have to, and in that small division of labor the photograph declines the easy sentiment its ingredients might otherwise promise.
Cig Harvey lives on the Maine coast, and her long project, gathered in books such as You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet, treats family and household as the ground of a serious art now held in American museum collections. She is unafraid of beauty but distrustful of its shortcuts, and here she withholds the reassurance of a smiling face. Printed as an archival pigment print, the picture keeps that green at full depth and the white lace luminous, so the small figure seems set into enamel.