Cig Harvey: FEAST
Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland
August 4 - 26, 2023
The Red Cake, 2023
Photograph on aluminum, 40" x 30"
© Cig Harvey, courtesy of Dowling Walsh Gallery
The Banquet, 2023
Photograph on aluminum, 30" x 40"
© Cig Harvey, courtesy of Dowling Walsh Gallery
The exhibition Cig Harvey: FEAST, is an immersive installation by the highly regarded photographer and writer CIG HARVEY, whose work urges the viewer to find and celebrate the beauty in the everyday. “I want people to see my work and seek more joy…because tomorrow will be different. Time is the only currency,” says the artist. Cig Harvey’s art is rich in implied narrative and deeply rooted in her environment. Nature, familial relationships, and domestic life inform her subjects. She describes FEAST as “a maximalist affair involving photographs, installation, audio, neon, and text. Something for all the senses.” Included are photographs of cakes from her most recent body of work. Lavish, extravagant cakes made by her daughter, Scout, as taught by a treasured family friend. Cig Harvey says, “I am fascinated by the rituals surrounding cakes. How entrenched they are in personal stories, both positive and negative. As much as cakes are a symbol of joy and life, they are also complicated and have a nefarious history connected to colonialism and gender inequality. I search for these dualities in the pictures.” The cakes in Cig Harvey’s photographs range from the dignified to the zany. Each is an offering to be shared with those present and those gone.
CIG HARVEY grew up in the county of Devon in South West England and received her MFA from Rockport College in Maine. Her photographs and artist books have been widely exhibited internationally. They are in the permanent collections of The Library of Congress, Yale University, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Farnsworth Art Museum, and the International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Her first solo museum exhibition was in 2012 at the Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway, in conjunction with the release of her first monograph, You Look At Me Like An Emergency(Schilt Publishing). In 2019, she had a solo exhibition at the Ogunquit Museum of Art, and most recently, her work was featured in the exhibition, In Bloom, at Fotografiska Museum, Stockholm, Sweden. She was awarded the Prix Virginia Laureate in 2018 and the Farnsworth Art Museum’s Maine in America Award in 2021. In 2022, she was the JP Morgan Highlighted Artist at Paris Photo. She lives in Rockport, Maine.
DOWLING WALSH GALLERY
365 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841
