American artist Spencer Finch spends most of his energies thinking about the effects of coloured light on the mind, and making related paintings, photographs, sculptures, video, and installation.
Read MoreSometimes, it is the artificial recreation of the effects of natural light that preoccupy him. He explores ways of overlapping the electrical experience with say, that of moonlight (e.g. Moonlight (Luna County, New Mexico, July 13, 2003), 2003, made with a fluorescent tube and coloured filters) or clouds (Passing Cloud (After Constable), 2014) made with light fixtures, crumpled filters suspended using monofilaments and clothes pegs).
Other times, he is pondering scientific explanations of such phenomena or drawing in technical expertise from the applied arts to modify public architecture with glass or tiles (e.g. The Garden in The Brain, 2017, for The Engineering Research Centre at Brown University). He considers Claude Monet a major influence.
Deeply cognisant of the impact of memory and the persistent power of the human imagination, Finch also likes to 'translate' items of culture—such as lines of famous poems by Emily Dickenson, Henry Thoreau, or Matsuo Bashō; or sections of popular film like The Wizard of Oz—into process-driven, transmuting abstractions or immersive, architecturally transformed installations.
Finch is widely respected for his passionate interest in making art that mimics nature, and which tries to interpret the structures of scientific elucidation. He is enthusiastic about measuring, if possible, the data of his outdoors experience involving natural phenomena, and trying to recreate through technical means that bodily and mental encounter, often through precise watercolour colour-matching that attempts to correlate specifics. Yet, that he has also made collaborations with video artist Bill Viola is no coincidence. There is a mystical dimension to his practice that accompanies his obsessive clinicism.
It is interesting to compare Spencer Finch's art practice to those of other 'light' artists. He does not incorporate found objects like David Batchelor or Bill Culbert, but his sculptural and installation presentations are complex and intricate, like those of Batchelor, and not as compositionally simple as the more holistic Olafur Eliasson or James Turrell, whose works tend to be much larger and more immersive anyway. Like these last two, it is the detail in science that mesmerises Finch. All four follow the traditions of optical research established by the rival Bauhaus colour perception theoreticians Josef Albers and Johannes Itten.
Finch's solo shows include Only the hand that erases writes the true thing, Lisson Gallery, London (2021); As Lightning on a Landscape, Spruance Gallery, Arcadia University, Glenside, Pennsylvania (2019); The Brain is deeper than the sea, James Cohan Gallery, New York (2018); Where Our Brain and the Universe Meet, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin (2013); First Sight, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand (2008); H2O, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago (2006); as much of noon as i can take between my finite eyes, Postmasters Gallery, New York (2004); From things you can't remember to things you can't forget, Postmasters Gallery, New York (2002); Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice, Postmasters Gallery, New York (1999); Periscope (for August Strindberg), Artnode, Stockholm (1997); and Literal Truth (with Paul Ramirez Jonas), Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut (1993).
Group exhibitions include Imperfect Clocks, Chart Gallery, New York (2020); Experience Traps, Middelheim Museum, Antwerp (2018); The Authority of Death, Jensen Gallery, Sydney, and Auckland, New Zealand (2015); the Folkestone Triennial, U.K. (2011) and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). Public commissions include A Cloud Index, Crossrail Paddington Station, London (2018); Lost Man Creek, Public Art Fund, New York (2016); and The High Line, New York (2009).
Spencer Finch's website can be found here.
John Hurrell | Ocula | 2021
