Cig Harvey
FEAST
August 4th - September 30th
Throughout Maine’s history, women have played key leadership roles in the shaping of the state. From groundbreaking politicians to cultural pioneers, women in Maine have been and continue to be trailblazers in their respective fields. The Farnsworth Art Museum owes its existence to one such woman who, through her generosity and vision, helped transform the small, working-class city of Rockland, a community of just over 7,000 people, into what is now recognized as the art capital of Maine.
Museum director Michael Mansfield calls photographer Cig Harvey “kind of a hero” and praises the artist for working with “contagious enthusiasm” and creating “inspiring” art.
Harvey calls the exhibition in Ogunquit something “I’ve always wanted and couldn’t articulate. I am lit up smiling. I’ve been lucky to have many shows in the last 20 years, but none like this.”
The exhibition, “Eating Flowers: Sensations of Cig Harvey,” is a mid-career survey of 70 photographs, video, neon and written word pieces. Collectively, the work addresses Harvey’s interest in exploring the sensations of touch, taste, sound, smell and memory. Her photos are full of mystery and sometimes feel like the tangible expression of a dream.
This summer, we selected six poems by women and asked photographers to let the poems inspire them.
- The New York Times
It's been well documented that a brush with death can reframe a person's relationship with life. When a car crash left photographer Cig Harvey unable to speak for several weeks, she turned to her art to make sense of life and the human experience. Harvey's most recent book, You an Orchestra You a Bomb, recalls in sprightly color and inky darkness the shortness of our time on earth. Through photographs and text, the book both celebrates and mourns the fleeting nature of existence. "Underneath thin skin, amongst saliva, organs, and bone, we are orchestras,” Harvey writes. "But open our mouths, deep down between tears, nerves, and gristle, we are bombs."
Cig Harvey's series and book, "You an Orchestra You a Bomb", are featured in the current issue of Aesthetica Magazine. The author writes, "Each vignette captures moments of awe, resting in the threshold between bewitchment and disaster. Each image nestled within split secornds where beauty mingles alongside an arresting sense of danger- dripping with sensory information and visceral consideration. There are moments of enlightment to be found in a tangled web of emotion: characters are brought to the surface as harbingers for events that are yet to play out."
Cig Harvey's book You an Orchestra You a Bomb was reviewed by Elin Spring and Suzanne Revy on the photography blog What Will You Remember. "Cig Harvey’s new book, You an Orchestra You a Bomb is a reverent autobiography of family and parental love. She opens with written vignettes of brief episodes from her past and, as if looking through a prism, describes a rainbow of colors in her memories from beige to blue to red."
Cig Harvey was featured in the New York Times for her new series "You an Orchestra You a Bomb." Jonathan Blaustein writes, "Her book and exhibit carefully recreate that sense of childhood wonder, mizing saturted colors with verdant symbols and engaging text, allowing viewers to contemplate that sense of the unknown, but from a place of joy rather thatn anxiety."
Cig Harvey's was included in an exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art titled, Contrasts: Varying Visions from Six Master Photographers. The exhibition also included works by Fran Forman, Andy Howard, Lou Jones, Sean Kernan, and Karin Rosenthal. "This exhibition will highlight the diverse kinds of images that are being made in our photographic worlds, and also shine a light on the techniques and approaches that are used to communicate a variety of personal and aesthetic messages."
When photographer Cig Harvey points her camera at her family, she creates magic. Familiar domestic environments are gently manipulated to lend a sense of the surreal. A gently blowing curtain obscures a kneeling figure; light becomes fairy dust and a hot tub is filled with limitless silver light. Published as ‘Gardening at Night’, the photographs are designed with a narrative in mind. “Light, colour, frame and format are purely in service of the story,” the Maine-based artist tells me.
Cig Harvey’s photograph is on the cover of PRO Photographer magazine, with a full feature article inside.
“Cig Harvey’s deceptively simple photographs tap into the universal elements of the human experience: love, loss, longing and belonging. She’s in demand for editorial and commercial work—as well as her for her fine art prints and books.”
Cig Harvey will be speaking at PhotoPlus Expo in NYC this Friday, 31st Oct at 10:15am. Come by to hear her seminar, “Turning Ideas Into Pictures: A Personal Story.”
Cig Harvey will be exhibiting her work at Firecat studio in Chicago from February 22 – March 23, 2013. Join us there on Friday, February 22 for a book signing at 5pm and the opening reception from 7 to 10pm.
Cig Harvey was featured in the British Sunday Times for her honor as a top ten candidate for the international photography prize for women, the Prix Virginia.
Cig Harvey’s You Look at Me Like An Emergency, is the subject of an in-depth review in PDN magazine’s November 2012 issue, and her photograph, White Witch Moth, is the striking cover image.
Cig Harvey was featured in a wonderful 12 page spread in Aesthetica, the cutting edge European art and culture magazine, for their August/September 2012 issue.
An excerpt: “The roles enacted throughout Emergency are quotidian meditations, common and remarkably graceful in their introspection… Through words and pictures Harvey has recorded an imaginative epic of unknowing, discovery, and deepening.”
LENSCRATCH’s interview with Cig Harvey came out today! The blogzine delves into Cig’s inspirations, creative process, her new book and upcoming projects.
Story telling has always been the primary inspiration for my pictures. I am big into the discipline of art and try to always make work even when I don’t feel like it. I put my secrets, hopes and concerns in my work. The subject matter and formal concerns of color, light and frame has always been the device to get to the story itself. I want my photographs to be a jolt. They explore a magic in the world while having one foot very much placed in reality.
Cig Harvey’s YOU LOOK AT ME LIKE AN EMERGENCY is a visual autobiography exploring the photographer’s central relationships over the course of more than a decade. Through rich, vibrant photographs and startlingly revealing writing, Cig transforms quotidian experiences that reference time and place, creating totems that mark key moments in her life. As much a map of one woman’s emotional life as it is a catalog of psychological archetypes, YOU LOOK AT ME LIKE AN EMERGENCY takes the viewer on a literal and metaphorical journey that deals with rejection, hope, indecision, strength, loss, and love to finally find a place called home. In seventy-four gorgeously colored photographs and seventeen personally written vignettes, EMERGENCY conveys the universal quest for personal identity and place in the world.
Join us tonight for our art openings and book release party!
Cig Harvey will be signing books for the official release of You Look At Me Like An Emergency from 5-7pm, Friday, June 1. You Look At Me Like An Emergency is a visual autobiography through seventy-four luminous photographs and startlingly honest writing. As much a map of one woman’s emotional life as it is a catalog of psychological archetypes, You Look At Me Like An Emergency takes the viewer on a literal and metaphorical journey that deals with rejection, hope, strength, loss and love to finally find a place called home.
Cig Harvey‘s new book, You Look at Me Like an Emergency, received high praise in the UK’s top newspaper, The Independent, in Sunday’s edition.
“A girl clutching a birdhouse on an evening lit by fireflies; another with a rhubarb leaf on her head; a woman clinging to a buoy in a flat blue sea: welcome to the weird, almost René Magritte-like inner world of the US-based photographer Cig Harvey. You Look at Me Like an Emergency is a visual autobiography in which her brightly coloured, appealingly composed but slightly off-kilter photographs are accompanied by snatches of journal jottings. She regularly poses in her own work, but her subjects are often photographed from behind, or with their faces obscured. The effect is that her work is somehow both intimate and unknowable.”
Cig Harvey’s photographs were featured on the front page of the Portland Press Herald’s “Audience” section in March 12th’s Maine Sunday Telegram. Her photographs are currently on display in a group photography exhibit at the University of Southern Maine, entitled “The Myths” from March 2 – April 14, 2012. Her work in the show was praised in The Portland Press Herald’s article as “evocative.”
Cig Harvey was recently short-listed for the 2012 Prix {Virginia}, the international photography prize for women. The jury selected Cig Harvey as one of the top ten candidates among 434 candidates from 45 countries. The jury was comprised of Monica Allende, Picture Editor, The Sunday Times Magazine; Sylvia Schildge, photographer, visual artist; Lucy Conticello, director of Photography, M – Le magazine du Monde; Jacques Audiard, filmmaker; Benjamin Klintoe, 2012 graduate of The Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs; Christian Caujolle, teacher, independent curator; Agnès Sire, director of the Fondation Cartier- Bresson; Xavier Barral, éditeur. The top ten candidates’ work will be presented on the Prix {Virginia} page, with new postings every other month from January 2013 to the next edition of the Prix {Virginia} in 2014.
Cig Harvey is an artist whose practice seeks to find the magical in everyday life. Rich in implied narrative, Harvey’s work is deeply rooted in the natural environment, and offers explorations of belonging and familial relationships.
The photographs and artist books of Cig Harvey, have been widely exhibited and remain in the permanent collections of major museums and collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; and the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Cig had her first solo museum show at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway, in the spring of 2012 in conjunction with the release of her monograph, You Look At Me Like An Emergency (Schilt Publishing, 2012). In 2019 she will have a solo exhibition at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine.
Cig has been a nominee for John Gutmann fellowship, the Santa Fe Prize, and Prix Pictet, and a finalist for the BMW Prize, the Karl Lagerfield Collection at Paris Photo, the Clarence John Laughlin Award and The Taylor Messing Photographic Portrait Prize. In 2017 Cig was awarded the prestigious 2017 Excellence in Teaching Award from Center and in 2018 she was named the 2018 Prix Virginia Laureate, an international photography award.
Cig lives and works in Rockport, Maine.
In the Garden by Vicki Goldberg - Cig Harvey trips the light fantastic in the dark. She dances on the edge of revelation: a sliver of light from a door and a hot pink balloon disclose a child; a vigorous moon drenches the earth with a dazzle of stars. She tends a garden world at night and her camera hones in on radiance, gleam and discoveries hidden in the shadows a hand reaching out, an arm.
For centuries, painters like Georges de la Tour and Willem Claes Heda lit up corners in paintings otherwise drenched in black, but when Alfred Stieglitz took a photograph one dark night in 1898 it was considered a feat. Night photographs have since become commonplace think of Brassai’s Paris de Nuit and O. Winston Link’s midnight trains — but Harvey’s light sources are uncommonly elusive and unexpected, even verging on conundrum, as if in agreement with Louise Gluck’s poem:
“It is not the moon, I tell you. / It is these flowers / lighting the yard.”
Harvey herself says these pictures “mark notations on time passing: A gold birthday cake, seasons changing, fallen deep red apples.” Indeed, nature can outdo clocks as a reminder that time is inexorable. Dusk comes on without fail every evening; day makes a habit of vanquishing night. On occasion, Harvey too relinquishes night in favor of sunlight: a girl in a patterned dress moves through a sunlit orchard that half hides her, binding her into the orchard’s growth; a red chair and a red-painted wall do their best to imitate the brilliance of pomegranate seeds. Yet sometimes even her daylight pictures balk at unlimited sun and court enough mist to baffle the eye instead: obscurity making a hesitant bid for dominance.
In photographs as in life, time moves solely in one direction but light and dark play unaccountable games. For light waltzes across the secrets and surprises of day and night alike, while an ardent and enterprising camera fills in the empty spaces on their dance cards.
