Spencer Finch, Night Sky (Over The Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004)
Art practice in the new millennium has increasingly become defined by a rigid practice of frameworks that strive to examine how humans comprehend visual and sensory experience. One such artist invested in exploring this concept to its full potential is Spencer Finch. Finch’s current show at Mass Moca entitled What Time Is It On The Sun? navigates the psychological factors that shape perception in a variety of mediums. The work walks the tight wire of being highly abstract but equally representational at the same time. “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,” Finch says in a catalogue for a 1997 show at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, CT. The subjects tap cultural signifiers that are as wide ranging as measurements of light from the lost city of Troy, to wind patterns recorded at Walden Pond, to Crazy Horse’s prohibition on photography’s power to steal ones soul.
There is a certain risk in placing so much emphasis on content that is driven by cultural moments. The danger in placing such a requirement on icons of familiarity is that they border on being a gimmick when repeated. Despite the artist’s reliance on making work that utilizes these devices there are numerous works that are completely engaging. One such occurrence is the piece, Night Sky (Over The Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11,2004) that confronts the viewer from the ceiling in the first room of the exhibition. Finch’s installation of Eighty-five light fixtures and 401 incandescent lamps is a visual response to the artist’s experiences, working outside in a parking lot with a flashlight in Arizona’s Painted Desert. The artist mixed a variety of paints in an effort to match the color of the night sky. By weighing the physical mass of each individual pigment in the mixture the artist was able to calculate the molecular ratio of each color in the combination. The resulting models represent a particular atom of each pigment’s molecular structure. These scientific engagements are utilized throughout the work in effort to initiate connections between consciousness and experience.
Spencer Finch, Two Hours, Two Minutes, Two Seconds (Wind At Walden Pond, March 12, 2007)
Finch draws his inspiration from cultural tourism of landscape as well as from writers Thoreau, and Dickinson, among others. In Two Hours, Two Minutes, Two Seconds (Wind At Walden Pond, March 12, 2007) there is a clear tip of the hat to Thoreau as the writer lived at the pond for two years, two months, and two days. Finch countered by measuring wind patterns over the pond for two hours, two minutes and two seconds. The resulting sculpture recreates the experience through the use of a dimming board controlling fifty-four plastic fans set in a semicircle in stacks of four. By using industrial materials through poetic means, Finch is putting forth the possibility of transformative experience through installation art. The artist is playing an interesting game with the world of conceptual art, which is historically considered one of de-materialization; Finch is trying to move beyond that dialogue. Sure, most of the materials used are likely to be found in any American home, but Finch is one of the many artists looking to the possibility of transformative experience through taping into collective experiences of humans. The likelihood of being overwhelmed by the scale of the pieces, a goal of many installation artists, is doubtful nonetheless. Finch’s engagement with the world and material is much quieter. How he deconstructs experience through visual and sensory means takes alot longer to fully understand. The issues put forth in the exhibition of difficulty of fully comprehending human experience will always require thoughtful investigation.
Finch has been able to respond to cultural issues that seem unable to fade from an interesting standpoint. For each generation, there are indescribable cultural moments that each individual seems to remember what he or she was doing in that instant. The artist reconsiders that notion by attempting to paint the exact color of Jackie Kennedy’s Pillbox Hat that she wore on the day of President Kennedy assassination in Dallas. The resulting effort is 100 paintings of different tones of pink hung in a linear grid. The work comments of how experience is unequal in description between language and vision as it is nearly impossible to describe the difference of each color of pink in words. In addition, Finch never claims which painting represents the exact color (if any.) The forty some odd works on view at Mass Moca do not all carry this kind of rigor but are nonetheless represent fourteen years of the art practice of constantly re-evaluating through vision.