Photos from The place the Senses Encounter the World

Towards this cultural backdrop, Cig Harvey’s work captures a lesser-understood—and even displaced—magnificence. Whereas others take pictures, Harvey, I’m satisfied, takes one thing else. This “one thing else” will be outlined by her relationship to the attractive—what it’s, what it might probably do, and, maybe 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 centered on loss. The baroque fullness of those pictures, their wealthy shade and geometry, elicits a felt absence, the phantom limb of elegy made excruciatingly current by way of an unbridled want for the world, the dwelling—a guide of grief articulated by way of immense, insatiable need. Greater than a mission of understanding, this can be a work of semiotic shifts. Harvey’s recurring motifs, or obsessions, are well-trodden, and never simply in images however in literature, too: flowers, kids, meals, nature, interiors. Utilizing symbols typically ascribed to girls as denigrating and minute, effete and decorous (and thereby ineffective), 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 filth of birthing, rutting, and feeding—associations deemed beneath the places of work of males—and treats them as potent and dignified nodes of creativeness.