Spencer Finch

Born 1962 in New Haven/CT, lives and works in New York

www.spencerfinch.com

Galleries:
Yvon Lambert, Paris
Lisson Gallery, London
Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin/Stockholm
Postmasters, New York




There is a distinct note of the sublime or transcendent in Spencer’s Finch’s works, which function as cathartic encounters with highly mediated, blatantly artificial renditions of nature. Finch’s marvelous Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004), a central sculpture in his recent acclaimed mid-career survey exhibition at MASS MoCA, uses a wall-mounted bank of precisely calibrated fluorescent tubes as a stand-in for blazing sunlight, which illuminates a suspended “cloud” made of blue, gray, and violet filters. Finch went to great lengths to engineer and replicate the exact light he experienced on a single day in Amherst, Massachusetts (home of the visionary poet Dickinson), yet his elemental work effectively conjures the kind of borderless visual and mental transport that one sometimes experiences outdoors, when alone with the sun, clouds, and sky: a free-flowing condition which the transcendentalist poet/philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once referred to as becoming, “a transparent eyeball.”

If Finch has his eye on the heavens (skies, clouds, galaxies, stars, and the sun have all figured prominently in his work) his feet are squarely on the cultural ground, in a cheesy America of UFO obsessions, rhinestones, Astroturf, synthetic breakfast drinks, and fading amusement parks⎯all of which have appeared in recent works. With Sky (Over Coney Island, November 21, 2004, 1:14 pm), balloons fitted into other balloons and then filled with helium replicate the exact color of the sky above New York City’s Coney Island at a particular moment. Suddenly, a jaunty and familiar amusement park plaything is implicated in vastness: the immense sky, vicissitudes of light, the passage of time. Finch’s other work for Carnival Within, involving a fluorescent light and filters, evokes neon signs (like those outside bars, motels, some churches, and all Las Vegan casinos) but also precisely, and stunningly, replicates the various hues of moonlight in rural New Mexico.

 

Exhibitions | Bibliography

Exhibitions:
2008/09: Gravity Always Wins, Dundee Centre for Contemporary Art, Scotland
2008: First Sight, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand
2007: Spencer Finch: What Time Is It on the Sun, MASS MoCA, North Adams/MA

Bibliography:
Stephanie Cash, “The Finch Effect,” in Art in America, January 2008
Mark Godfrey, “A Rainbow in Brooklyn/On Spencer Finch,” in Parkett, no. 79, June 2007
Bridget L. Goodbody, “Trying to Capture a Trick of Light, a Tug of Memory,” in The New York Times, June 19, 2007
Spencer Finch. What Time Is It on the Sun, texts by Daniel Birnbaum, Susan Cross, Suzanne Hudson, and Joseph Thompson, exh. cat. MASS MoCA, North Adams/MA 2007