Spencer Finch, Bee Purple, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

Spencer Finch, The Garden of Eden (All Colors in my Paintbox), 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Spencer Finch, The Garden of Eden (All Colors in my Paintbox) (detail), 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Spencer Finch, The Garden of Eden (All Colors in my Paintbox) (detail), 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Spencer Finch, Walden Pond (Morning Effect, March 13, 2007), 2007. Courtesy of the artist.

Spencer Finch, Walden Pond (Morning Effect, March 13, 2007) (detail), 2007. Courtesy of the artist.

Spencer Finch, 8456 Shades of Blue (After Hume), 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

Spencer Finch, 8456 Shades of Blue (After Hume) (detail), 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

Museum of Art
Rhode Island School of Design
224 Benefit Street
401-277-4949
Providence
Painting Air: Spencer Finch
February 24-July 29, 2012.

Spencer Finch’s art is internationally known for its compelling exploration of memory and perception through materials such as watercolor, photography, glass, electronics, video, and fluorescent lights. In this two-part show, the Museum debuts a new sculptural installation by Finch alongside works he selected from the RISD Museum’s collection.

“The Museum’s invitation to Finch to create an exhibition highlighting works in our collection has its roots in Andy Warhol’s Raid the Icebox 1, the seminal project mounted at the RISD Museum of Art in 1970. It’s exciting to see how Finch’s approach to the Museum’s collection contrasts with Warhol’s,” says Museum Director John W. Smith.

The work of Impressionist painter Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) serves as the aesthetic touchstone for both parts of the exhibition, and even informed its title. Painting Air comes from a statement Monet made in 1895: “I want to paint the air... and it is nothing other than the impossible.”

In one section, visitors see Finch’s new installation, created for this exhibition and also titled Painting Air (2011). Inspired by Finch’s recent visit to Monet’s studio and water garden in Giverny, France, it consists of monumental sheets of colored glass — freestanding, moving, and leaning against the gallery walls, painted with blocks or stripes of color based on tonalities he observed at Giverny. Visitors walk along a lighted path to experience the constant changes of light and color.

“As abstract and ephemeral as some of Finch’s projects appear to be, they are based in fact and scientific phenomena. He acutely observes natural occurrences, which he then filters through memory as well as literary, artistic, and scientific accounts. The results are often poetic, as he tries to make visible what cannot easily be seen,” says Judith Tannenbaum, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art.

Several other works complement and anchor the central large installation. For example, Finch’s Bee Purple is a piece that explores the existence of a color made of yellow and ultraviolet that honeybees can see, but is undetectable to the human eye.

In another section, works from the collection that Finch chose for this exhibition starts with a painting encountered at the Museum in the late 1980s: Monet’s The Basin at Argenteuil, which Finch copied during his time as a graduate student. Finch’s study of Monet’s luminous composition proved to be a turning point that set him on the trajectory he has followed to this day, and the Museum is delighted to present this extraordinary work as part of Painting Air.

Other works, arranged in thematic groupings or “episodes,” vary from intensely expressive drawings by Egon Schiele (Austrian, 1890-1918), fluid watercolors by John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925), and romantic American landscape paintings attributed to Ralph Blakelock (American, 1847-1919) and Albert Pinkham Ryder (American, 1847-1917) to a Japanese Noh robe and high-tech swatches of reflective fabric for a 1980s astronaut suit. Finch’s placement of the objects reveals aesthetic influences between artists, unexpected connections among disparate works, and his personal sensibility.

Spencer Finch was born in New Haven, CT, in 1962, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He produces work in a wide variety of mediums, including watercolor, photography, glass, electronics, video, and fluorescent lights. He is perhaps best known for exploring concepts of memory and perception through light installations.

Finch’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world, most recently at the Art Institute of Chicago (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2011); the Folkestone Triennial, UK (2011); and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2010) — as well as projects in Rome; Paris; Berlin; Groningen, the Netherlands; and Brisbane; Australia, among others. He was featured in the 2009 Venice Biennale; the 2004 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and in a 2007 retrospective at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA.

Finch’s work is in many distinguished collections, including High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, among others. He received a degree in comparative literature from Hamilton College and an MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1989.

Spencer Finch, Moon Dust (Apollo 17), 2009. 150 light fixtures and 417 incandescent bulbs, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin. Photo: Wolfgang Träger.

Spencer Finch, 366 (Emily Dickinson’s Miraculous Year), 2009. 366 paraffin candles, 246 in. diameter. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Luke Stettner.

Spencer Finch, Sunset (South Texas, 6/21/03), 2003. Fluorescent lights, fixtures, and filters, 16 x 480", Courtesy of Yvon Lambert, Paris. Photo: Ansen Seale.

Spencer Finch, Moonlight (Venice, March 10, 2009), 2009. Filters and tape, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin. Photo: Wolfgang Träger.

Spencer Finch, 366 (Emily Dickinson’s Miraculous Year) (detail), 2009. 366 paraffin candles, 246 in. diameter. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Luke Stettner.

Spencer Finch, Abecedary (Nabokov’s Theory of a Colored Alphabet applied to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) (detail), 2004. Ink and watercolor on paper, 108 x 360 in. Courtesy of Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin.

Spencer Finch, Abecedary (Nabokov’s Theory of a Colored Alphabet applied to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle), 2004. Ink and watercolor on paper, 108 x 360 in. Courtesy of Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin.

Corcoran Gallery of Art + Design
500 Seventeenth Street NW
202-639-1700
Washington
Spencer Finch:
My Business, with the Cloud
September 11, 2010-
January 23, 2011

NOW at the Corcoran, a new contemporary program featuring a series of one- and two-artist exhibitions, opens with an exhibition of new work by Brooklyn-based artist Spencer Finch. Finch’s sculptural installations, photographs, and drawings seek to capture the elusive space between perception and the outside world, probing the intersections of science, nature, and memory. Using industrial materials to recreate individual experiences or particular sensations such as candlelight or the wind off of Walden Pond, he often draws from historical
accounts by poets and philosophers to explore the persistence of human curiosity. Finch’s works play with light, color, and time to remind his viewers that looking is never as simple as it looks.

Finch’s exhibition at the Corcoran takes up the subject of clouds. Drawing from the history and environment of Washington, D.C., his project explores the poetic, physical, and meteorological aspects of these natural phenomena.

Passing Cloud, 2010, is a site-specific sculpture made for the Corcoran’s Rotunda that alludes to a moment on a summer’s day in 1863 when Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln crossed paths.

“The new work Spencer Finch is creating for the Corcoran’s Rotunda is integrally tied to Washington. It is about specific events that took place here but also about what draws people to the city and the desire to experience history. Passing Cloud recreates the light of a passing cloud at Vermont and L Streets, where the poet watched for the President to ride by on horseback. It explores the individual, changeable nature of experience and, ultimately, how such experiences become part of our collective history,” said Sarah Newman, curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran.

“Passing Cloud is a kind of 'anti-monument’ to these two great historical figures. Instead of solidifying an idea of the past in stone, Finch's cloud is a dynamic and changing environment that tries to capture a living, breathing moment in time. The work is about the impulse to experience history firsthand, by Whitman, by Finch, and by visitors to Washington, D.C. It is also about the way that history is always experienced individually, and how such moments are as fleeting as they are memorable,” Newman said.

The second part of the exhibition, in one of the museum’s second floor galleries, is a rigorous examination of the different ways we can know a cloud — through scientific analysis, through observation, and through metaphor. In a selection of drawings, photographs, and sculpture, Finch attempts to make something solid out of air, and investigates the atmospheric properties and poetic possibilities of light, water vapor, and sky.

Spencer Finch: My Business, with the Cloud is Finch’s first one-artist exhibition in Washington, D.C.

Spencer Finch: My Business, with the Cloud is made possible through the support of the Women’s Committee of the Corcoran, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation FUNd, and Steven M. Sumberg.

Spencer Finch was born in 1962 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Hamilton College, and Doshisha University in Kyoto. Finch had a major exhibition, What Time is it on the Sun?, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007. His recent exhibition, As if the Sea Should Part and Show a Further Sea, was exhibited at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia in 2009. Finch was also included in the Making Worlds exhibition at the 2009 Venice Biennale, the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and has created several works of public art, including the recent project for the High Line in New York with Creative Time. His work is held in many museum collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Exhibitions in NOW at the Corcoranaddress issues central to local, national, and global communities of Washington, D.C., responding to the collection, history, and architecture of the Corcoran.

Spencer Finch, Jetstream Over North America, (Forecast for 10 1⁄2 Days Ahead) (detail), 2000. Watercolor, on paper, 26 x 36" Courtesy of the artist.

Spencer Finch, Moon Dust (Apollo 17), 2009. 150 light fixtures and 417 incandescent bulbs, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin. Photo: Wolfgang Träger.

Spencer Finch, Taxonomy of Clouds, (detail), 2006. One of 17 digital inkjet prints, 6 x 6" each. Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago.

Spencer Finch, What Time is it on the Sun?, Installation view.

Spencer Finch, What Time is it on the Sun?, Installation view.

Spencer Finch, Cloud (H20).

Spencer Finch, Passing Cloud (installation view, Corcoran Gallery of Art Rotunda, 2010) 100 fluorescent lights, fixtures, filters, monofilament, and clothespins, Dimensions variable, Photo: Chan Chao.

MASS MoCA
87 Marshall Street
North Adams
413-662-2111
Building 4, First Floor
Spencer Finch:
What Time Is It on the Sun?
May 26, 2007-Spring 2008

Spencer Finch wants us to consider the question: Is it possible to see yourself seeing? As he explains: "There is always a paradox inherent in vision, an impossible desire to see yourself seeing. A lot of my work probes this tension; to want to see, but not being able to." He explores that challenge and the mechanics and mysteries of perception in a landmark exhibition which opens May 26, 2007 including over 40 works — comprising more than 160 pastels, 62 photographs, 6 major sculptural installations, plus a 30-foot long drawing — made over the last 14 years. Spencer Finch: What Time Is It On the Sun? includes four major new works, two of which are site-specific installations created for MASS MoCA.

Finch blends scientific method and a poetic sensibility in his work. Using media including pastel, watercolor, photography, glass tile, video, sculpture, and light installation, as well as unexpected materials (ranging from Tang to invisible ink), he depicts the most elusive of subjects — wind, candlelight, even the scent of Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal.

A review in Artforum cites a scene from the Jim Jarmusch film Mystery Train in which a young Japanese couple sit in their Memphis hotel room. "As the guy keeps snapping pictures of their room, his girlfriend asks why he takes photos of their rooms and not the sites they visit. He replies, 'Those other things are in my memory. The hotel rooms and the airports are the things I'll forget.' Finch has a similar method for remembering a place or evoking a feeling: drawing his eye and not the object of his gaze, or re-creating only one element of a sensorial experience."

The paradoxical exhibition title refers to Finch's interest in limits of logic and vision as well as the importance of light in his work. According to Finch, "Ultimately the sun is always the impossible goal of my work — always the goal, always absent.” Reaching across time and space, the light of the sun has preoccupied philosophers and artists, like Finch and Monet and Turner before him, throughout history.

Finch focuses on sites that captivate the popular imagination. Through travel to and study of storied locales like Loch Ness and the Grand Canyon he addresses the intersection of history, memory, and perception. Using unconventional materials, he has rendered the sky over Roswell, New Mexico, in glittering rhinestones and the clouds above the beach at Coney Island as purplish-blue balloons.

In a gallery facing the museum's entrance courtyard, Finch created a luminous wall of stained glass, one of two site-specific works created for MASS MoCA. In this yet-to-be-titled installation, the colored glass panes, a mix of yellow, red, and grey, transforms the sun's light into the intimate glow of a candle's flame. In a different north-facing gallery, Finch used colored lighting gels to filter the local sunlight to match the light he has measured daily in his Brooklyn studio since January 1, 2007. Like a wall calendar each windowpane corresponds to a particular day. The gels cover just a portion of each pane, allowing visitors to experience the light of two different places and times simultaneously.

In addition to the site-specific installation, new work in the show includes West (Sunset in my motel room, Monument Valley, February 26, 2007, 5:36-6:06 pm) (2007), exhibited only once before. The piece replicates the waning light of sunset with the light projected from nine video monitors. The monitors play a selection of stills from John Ford's 1956 epic Western The Searchers that change once a minute over a 30-minute period mimicking the color and intensity of the fading twilight Finch precisely measured in the Monument Valley desert. Another new still-to-be-titled work replicates the wind blowing across Walden Pond's wooded shores as described by Thoreau. This piece complements Finch's earlier installation Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004) (2004), an homage to another New England-based luminary. These works are shown alongside Composition in Red and Green (2000) a nod to Isaac Newton and his epiphany. The work, which features a suspended chute that drops apples onto a green carpet, adds smell, sound, and motion to Finch's interpretation of the still life.

Finch reconfigures for MASS MoCA's space Night Sky (Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004) (2004), an installation that attracted much popular and critical attention at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Hung from the ceiling, the light work, which is based on the molecular structure of the chemicals in a mix of pigments, hovers overhead the atom-like bulbs glowing like stars.

MASS MoCA's Prints and Drawings gallery is devoted to Finch's substantial early work Trying to Remember the Color of Jackie Kennedy's Pillbox Hat (1994.) The 100 different pink drawings that make up the installation represent Finch's attempt to remember an iconic object attached to one of the most reproduced and remembered events in American history. The work is dogged in its pursuit of accuracy while underscoring the futility of the task. The work's exhibition at MASS MoCA is one of only a handful of times it has been shown in its entirety since 1994.

102 Colors from My Dreams comprises 102 watercolors. Between November 21, 2000 and May 1, 2002, Finch kept a dream diary at his bedside, in which he would record as best he could remember the colors from his dreams. Attempting to recreate the most distinctive colors from memory, Finch mixed various inks until he found the tones that matched most faithfully what he had recorded in his diary. He then poured drops of the colored ink on to square sheets of paper and then folded each sheet, which when opened again revealed a series of abstract Rorschach-like blots. For Finch the Rorschach-blot also offered the most appropriate form for thinking about the abstract expression of the unconscious.

Two mosaic works from 1998 which at first appear abstract, are actually based on photographs that depict white-out conditions on some of the world's highest peaks (Mount Everest, K2) are from an installation called Wandering Lost Upon the Mountains of our Choice. His Peripheral Error (after Moritake) (2004) is series of watercolors that depict images of butterflies as seen in his peripheral vision. Interior of Room 4, Hotel de la Cathedrale, Rouen, May 18 -22, 1996, morning effect, noon effect, evening effect (1995) is an homage to Monet's paintings of the changing light on Rouen's cathedral. Finch focuses on the light in his hotel room across the street from the cathedral Monet memorialized.
A gallery is also be devoted to his nuanced studies of darkness while another features a selection of "white" drawings documenting the almost imperceptible traces of melting snowflakes and the sun's oxidizing effects on paper.

Several works made in the artist's family home in nearby Vermont are included. For 42 Minutes (After Kawabata) (2004), the artist shot seven photographs of the view outside his window. Taken seven minutes apart in the waning light of dusk, the photographs capture the magical moments during which the window transforms from a clear pane showing the sunset to a mirror reflecting the interior of the house.

The performance-based work Self-Portrait as Crazy Horse, first created in 1993, is performed for the sixth time for the MASS MoCA exhibition. Transforming the gallery into camera and dark room, Finch prepares a gallery wall with light sensitive chemicals used to create a cyanotype. Positioning himself between the wall and a window, the artist stands motionless between dawn and dusk while light pours over him. While the rest of the wall turns blue, the area in shadow remains a ghostly white. Referencing the American Indian's fear of photography, the work hints at Finch's own skepticism of the medium.

Finch was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1962. He received a degree in comparative literature from Hamilton College and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. The artist has had solo exhibitions at ArtPace, San Antonio; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. His work has also been presented at the Barbican Centre Art Gallery in London; the Jewish Museum, New York; Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. His work is in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; among others. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn.

A monograph on the artist has been published in conjunction with the exhibition. The fully illustrated, 192-page publication features three essays and an extensive plate section highlighting over 30 selected works with both images and text. Authors include exhibition curator Susan Cross as well as Daniel Birnbaum and Suzanne Hudson. An exhibition history and bibliography is also be included. The hardcover catalogue, which features a unique slipcase and three artist projects, is be distributed by D.A.P.

Spencer Finch, West (Sunset in my motel room, Monument Valley, February 26, 2007, 5:36-6:06 pm), 2007.