SPENCER FINCH

The title of the presentation, Forever is composed of Nows, is borrowed from an Emily Dickinson book ofpoems. The title reflects how – while each individual work in the exhibition is an observation of a definedmoment or event – together, these snapshots create a panoptic whole, each a recording of Finch’sextraordinary experiments, challenging himself to capture ineffable temporal and sensory experiences usinga variety of everyday materials and tools.

Inspired by Monet’s practice of planting a garden with the express intention of painting it, Finch’s Followinga bee (2021) is a series of drawings centered around a large bunch of zinnia flowers, planted for this purposeby the artist from seeds. Perched on a ladder above the flowers, Finch followed each bee’s flight pattern as itcross-pollinated the zinnia, creating a line in acetate as a surrealistic trace of their journey. Finch thenselected one each of the varieties of zinnias and matched the colours using pastel.

Alongside this is the LED work, Reciting poetry at the greening of spring (2023), produced following arecent visit to The Getty Center in Los Angeles where he saw the Chinese painter Wu Li’s hanging scroll,Reciting Poetry before the Yellowing of Autumn (1674). Finch then recited two poems to the trees in ProspectPark, Brooklyn – There’s a little madness in the Spring by Emily Dickinson, and O sweet spontaneous byE.E. Cummings – and, inspired by J. M. W. Turner’s mastery of light and atmosphere, translated the hues heobserved into a series of LED tubes filtered with bands of colour. Similarly, in Cloud (cumulus, GlacierNational Park) (2023) Finch studied the opacity and translucency of a cloud using 3M ‘magic tape’ toarticulate the subtle changes in cloud formation, serving as a poetic alternative to the hypnotic experience ofgazing into the sky.

The exhibition also features two watercolour drawings, Pacific Ocean Laguna Beach, LA 7/27/14 (2015) andAtlantic Ocean from Isle au Haut (2017), from an ongoing series based on observations of various bodies ofwater at different times of day, translating the immense, vast forces of nature into delicate, graceful lines.Alongside this are three works from the series titled, Study for Ulysses (Coney Island) (2023), titled afterJames Joyce’s novel, which document a day of wandering as a series of fleeting colour sensations. Frommorning to night, Finch extracted and abstracted colours from his environment using the commercial colour-matching system Pantone. Arranged in the gallery, these works echo not only the artist’s physicalmovements throughout the day, but also the journey of his mind – the shifts in hue and tone mirroring eachnew interruption or encounter in consciousness.