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 are placed in front of a black void with a single pink birdcage lifted into the light, and inside it, calmly returning our look, is a young woman’s face. She stands square to the camera, a dark sweater dissolving into the ground behind her, and holds the cage on a shallow tray with both hands, presenting herself the way one might present a specimen or a dessert. The staging is frank about being staged. Nothing here pretends to have been stumbled upon.
The wire dome, painted a nursery pink, does the picture’s thinking. Its bars fall across one visible eye and the bridge of the nose, and where the cage should hold a bird it holds a person instead, the metaphor delivered without apology. A small white bird sits embroidered on her chest, the caged creature relocated to a safe emblem. Everything is arranged for legibility: the pale skin against black, the sweetness of the color against the severity of the idea, the tidy symmetry that makes captivity look almost like an offering.
Cig Harvey builds her pictures like small theaters of interior life, and this directness about construction is part of their contemporary intelligence; her monographs, among them The Blue Notebook and Blue Violet, sit in American museum collections. She belongs to a generation that treats the domestic prop as a serious instrument rather than a whimsy. As an archival pigment print the image keeps its blacks absolute and its pink unnervingly precise, so the cage seems to float, weightless and exact, at the surface of the paper.
We are placed in front of a black void with a single pink birdcage lifted into the light, and inside it, calmly returning our look, is a young woman’s face. She stands square to the camera, a dark sweater dissolving into the ground behind her, and holds the cage on a shallow tray with both hands, presenting herself the way one might present a specimen or a dessert. The staging is frank about being staged. Nothing here pretends to have been stumbled upon.
The wire dome, painted a nursery pink, does the picture’s thinking. Its bars fall across one visible eye and the bridge of the nose, and where the cage should hold a bird it holds a person instead, the metaphor delivered without apology. A small white bird sits embroidered on her chest, the caged creature relocated to a safe emblem. Everything is arranged for legibility: the pale skin against black, the sweetness of the color against the severity of the idea, the tidy symmetry that makes captivity look almost like an offering.
Cig Harvey builds her pictures like small theaters of interior life, and this directness about construction is part of their contemporary intelligence; her monographs, among them The Blue Notebook and Blue Violet, sit in American museum collections. She belongs to a generation that treats the domestic prop as a serious instrument rather than a whimsy. As an archival pigment print the image keeps its blacks absolute and its pink unnervingly precise, so the cage seems to float, weightless and exact, at the surface of the paper.