Gardening at Night

by Cig Harvey, Vicki Goldberg

Gardening at Night is an exploration of home, family, nature, and time. It’s predecessor, You Look at Me Like an Emergency, captured journeys in finding and defining home, while Gardening at Night denotes settling into one’s landscape, and creating life where you are. The narrative throughout has a delicious element of magical realism – the viewer is left with the feeling of waking within a dream. On the other hand there is familiarity in what she evokes – something primal and instinctual that points to each person’s connection to nature. Seasons figure prominently as metaphors for the cycle of life, and interplays between shadow and light underscore the work. Each photograph and written vignette offers a tactile experience of things that ordinarily seem intangible – the secret life of birds, of barren winter trees, of the lake in spring time, or the girl in the window whose house you pass every day. The jewel-toned images are arresting and weighted, but punctuated, as always by Cig’s characteristic whimsical style. The result is an intensely personal collection that captures an experience of the world that is at once otherworldly and yet instantly familiar.

144 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 2015