Cig Harvey British, b. 1973

That blue — a wet, voltaic, just-past-dusk blue, the kind that exists only in the ten minutes after the sun quits — is the whole event here. Cig Harvey photographs a patch of chive blossoms from directly above, and in the failing light their pompom heads stop being kitchen-garden pink and start burning like a hundred small gas flames turned low, scattered across a bed of grass gone black-green.

Irving Penn brought flowers into the studio one by one to sit for him; Harvey works the other way around, going out to meet hers at the hour when color misbehaves. The overhead view flattens the clump into an all-over field — no horizon, no vase, no arranging hand — so the blossoms read as a constellation, or the last burst of a firework caught before it falls. Up close, each head turns out to be a frizzed little burr, petals splintered like cut paper around a violet core. The stems barely register: dark wires holding up all that light.

It's a big, romantic picture built from the humblest material on the property — herbs, basically, the garnish drawer. That's the charm, and also the point. Harvey has a knack for catching the domestic world in its off-hours, when nobody's looking and the ordinary is briefly dressed for the opera. Daylight will hand these flowers back to the kitchen in Rockport. The photograph declines to.