Cig Harvey

ARTIST FEATURE

Cig Harvey has been featured in Maine Home and Design Magazine’s April 2011 Issue.

To view the feature, click the blue link below:

Cig Harvey MHD_0411_CurrentWork_-Cig

Off-Compass, Accompanied by an Imp

“Cig Harvey’s world has a tendency to veer about twenty degrees north of expectations.  It’s barely possible that an imp hides in her camera – it might even be an imp that moonlights as a mystery writer – and what do you know, it steals out now and then to put its stamp on her photographs.  How else to explain a man holding a rooster directly in front of his face — possibly the only such image in history — or a woman in a dress standing on a buoy in the middle of the ocean?  Oh bother, trying to answer questions like these would be rather like trying to explain a piano concerto, or, for that matter, love.  I’d gladly settle for the influence of an imp.  However they came about, pictures that pose such entertaining and unanswerable questions map out a decidedly individual and delightfully off-compass realm.

Which brings up the question of whether explanations are a suitable answer to photographs.  Some things are meant to be experienced, not parsed.  It’s true that certain photographs cry out for elucidation (or at least captions).  If they’re news photographs, it’s useful to know whether you’re seeing friend or foe, Cambodia or Afghanistan..  If the images are from unfamiliar cultures with myths and politics beyond our ken, we need help.   But abstract photographs like Francis Bruguiere’s cut-paper abstractions in the 1920s or Shinichi Maruyama’s recent photographs of jets of paint flung into mid air?  We know how they were made, but the real response lies out beyond the facts.

Cig Harvey’s photographs don’t really need rational deciphering anyway; taken whole without too much interference, they set mind and imagination dancing.  Besides, most of them are quite comprehensible images of things and events that ordinarily would be…… ordinary, but an idiosyncratic viewpoint, or a whim, or a fillip, ricochets quietly off first impressions.  A bowl of cherries sits on the floor – hmm, the floor — with a couple of red footprints beside it.  That’s clear enough, yet it’s not where your everyday bowl of cherries sits, and it could occur to you that people seldom step in cherries barefoot.  Since vision and emotion come first, art has a habit of provoking afterthoughts.  First one savors the gleam of red fruit and the smooth chalky blue of floorboards worn down here and there to pink; only afterwards does reason chime in.  Same with Monet’s Nymphéas: viewers float on water and clouds and lilies before remembering to wonder which way is up.

Harvey makes unimportant things of this world leap to life in color, like a garden hose that’s as turquoise as a jeweled snake, slithering peacefully along a dark brown path and making its perfectly focused way among blurry trees and spotty flowers.  Then there are scrumptious children who are cast as themselves and play their roles with the range of Old Vic troupers.  A girl as steadfast and stolid as a nineteenth-century portrait subject regards us from the rear window of a red pickup truck that came to rest in a field of snow.  Another girl sits in a library, her feet dangling so far above the floor the chair might be oversized.  Darkness and shadow suggest a rather gothic introduction to books, yet light shines on the child’s face, her lustrous robin’s-egg-blue blouse, and her pink-banded shoes. It’s her expression that is so captivating, her lowered head and raised eyes and tight little smile that says, ‘I know exactly what I’m doing and it’s just a touch sly.’

These are staged photographs, staged mysteries even, but sometimes serendipity (or that imp) lends a hand at the last moment.  What is a beautiful young woman doing in a field with a birdhouse in hand on a summer evening when water and sky have melded into a curtain of blue?  She might be on a special mission devised by the photographer, but said photographer could not have turned on the fireflies or bid a single star to shine on the proceedings..  And what is a girl doing in a long dress in the high grass, regarding us appraisingly and holding a baby doll facing her chest as if it were in a snuggly, and however did it happen that the dog, who could scarcely be counted on to listen to a prompter, posed so perfectly aslant and looked off in the other direction to complete the picture?

Photographs like these have the unlikely charm and openness of a question mark, leaving plenty of room for imagination to prance about if it has a mind to. Better still, they don’t demand an answer, or an explanation, any more than music does – or, for that matter, love, which comes bearing questions but without any question has an imp in tow.”

Vicki Goldberg, 2011

BIOGRAPHY

Cig Harvey’s photographs are intertwined with a rich narrative and autobiography. Since the age of thirteen, she has found herself captivated by and single-mindedly committed to the medium of photography as a way to tell stories.

She is a full time Professor of Photography at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, teaches workshops and regularly gives talks on her work and process at universities and institutions around the world. Her photographs have been exhibited widely and are in the permanent collections of major museums including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY. She was a finalist for the prestigious BMW prize at Paris Photo in 2010 and is scheduled to have her first solo museum show at The Stenerson Museum, Oslo, Norway, in the spring of 2012.

Cig’s devotion to visual storytelling has lead to innovative international campaigns and features with New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, Kate Spade Inc., Bloomingdales and her  assignment of a year of covers with Maine magazine.