By contrast cultural backdrop, Cig Harvey’s paintings captures a lesser-understood—and even displaced—good looks. Whilst others take images, Harvey, I’m satisfied, takes one thing else. This “one thing else” may also be outlined via her courting to the gorgeous—what it’s, what it could do, and, most likely extra urgent, the way it turns into a car for self-knowledge. “The clocks return, giving an additional hour of disappointment,” Harvey writes, revealing the vagus nerve on this new sequence, which, for all its exuberance and sensual decadence, is focused on loss. The baroque fullness of those photographs, their wealthy colour and geometry, elicits a felt absence, the phantom limb of elegy made excruciatingly provide thru an unbridled need for the arena, the residing—a e-book of grief articulated thru immense, insatiable need. Greater than a mission of understanding, it is a paintings of semiotic shifts. Harvey’s routine motifs, or obsessions, are well-trodden, and no longer simply in images however in literature, too: vegetation, youngsters, meals, nature, interiors. The use of symbols ceaselessly ascribed to ladies as denigrating and minute, effete and decorous (and thereby pointless), Harvey, like Sappho, Plath, Murasaki, and Woolf, like Maier, Mann, and Weems, leans into the “home” as inexhaustible subversion. She takes the phrase’s Latin root, domus, which means “of animals,” and thereby the grime of birthing, rutting, and feeding—associations deemed underneath the places of work of fellows—and treats them as potent and dignified nodes of creativeness.
