Spencer Finch
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Born 1962, New Haven, Connecticut; lives in Brooklyn, New York
Cosmic Latte, 2007; 150 light fixtures and incandescent bulbs, dimensions variable; dimensions variable/Permanently installed at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts
Spencer Finch pursues the most elusive and ineffable of experiences through his work—from the color of a sunset outside a Monument Valley motel room to the afternoon breeze by Walden Pond, from the shadows of passing clouds in the yard of Emily Dickinson’s home to the light in a Turner painting.
With both a scientific approach to gathering data and a poetic sensibility, Finch’s installations, sculptures, and works on paper filter perception through the lens of nature, history, literature, and personal experience. “Contrary to what one might expect,” writes Susan Cross in the monograph for the artist’s 2007 solo exhibition What Time Is It On the Sun? at MASS MoCA, “Finch’s efforts toward accuracy—the precise measurements he takes under different conditions and at different times of day—resist, in the end, a definitive result or single empirical truth about his subject. Instead, his dogged method reinforces the fleeting, temporal nature of the observed world, illustrating his own version of a theory of relativity.”
The color of the universe, determined in 2009, that is the light emitted by 200,000 galaxies, is more tan than had previously been thought. Formerly, blue was the conjectured hue. Finch configures light fixtures to hold tannish-white LED light bulbs, varying in size, and arranged to recall the swooping shape of the Milky Way, from the vantage point of the Northern Hemisphere in March. The reflections through the windows of this double loaded long gallery extend the work across the winding Hoosic River.
Trained first in the humanities, specifically comparative literature, before he went to Rhode Island School of Design as a graduate student, Finch creates installations, sculptures, and works on paper that bring together the conceptual rigor of scientific inquiry with poetry, creating conceptually driven, lyrical works of art.
Photo by Douglas Mason © Spencer Finch 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.
