Like many artists, Spencer Finch seeks to grasp what we ourselves can't reach. His installations combine poetry and beauty with science, investigating the limits of perception in a kind of experimental process that may seem unfamiliar at first, but becomes a generous and accessible opportunity to expand our own horizons through art. Finch is an alchemist of representation, turning visual impulses into physics and back into sculpture. He turns dreams into drawings, transforming them into a Freudian excavation of an artist's subconscious.
The institution hosting the exhibition, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or Mass MoCA, has a reputation for hosting daring shows and has weathered the storm of Christopher Buchel's spending problems on a museum-commissioned piece. Shows such as "Spencer Finch: What Time Is It on the Sun?" demonstrate that the museum is by no means irresponsible to the artists it chooses to feature. Finch's retrospective is made up of seven self-contained installations as well as numerous drawings, paintings and wall-hung pieces.
Finch's role as an alchemist is apparent even in the entrance to the sprawling exhibit as constructions of light bulbs and connecting rods hang on the ceiling. Not until reading the wall text does one realize that these light bulbs are representations of molecules that make up paint pigments.
To construct this piece, the artist traveled to the Nevada desert and, with the use of a flashlight, studied the colors of the night sky, mixing paint to match the colors he saw. Finch then analyzed the pigments and used their molecular structures to create the sculpture. In this way, the artist circumvents traditional methods of description. Instead of painting the sky as a landscape artist, Finch creates an alternate representation that is no less beautiful than a painting or drawing. It is a poetic translation of our perceptions into physical objects. A poetic sense runs throughout Finch's work. In a photographic series, Finch shows the changing views through a window at night. The image slowly transforms from a winter landscape into a reflection of the inside of a house over the 42 minutes the photos chart. Even though Finch's work opposes the "tyranny of photography" in claiming to represent absolute truth, this is a different use of the medium than the standard objective description of photography. Instead, it is a quiet and subtle interception of our senses, showing the audience that photography, like one's eyes, can play tricks. The window is a hole to the outside, but it gradually becomes blocked not by reality but by another reflection.
Of the larger installations, Finch's "Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, Aug. 28, 2004)," strikes the strongest chord. Rounding a corner into the largest gallery in the show, viewers are confronted by ethereal daylight breaking through blue and purple cellophane: a sculpture representing the inspiration for Dickinson's famous poem describing a cloud moving across the sun.
Here, Finch transmogrifies poetry into sculpture in a kind of perceptual experiment. He claims to replicate the exact conditions of Dickinson's poem, but the space between his efforts and the real thing, the gap between the imagery that the poem inspires in our minds and the poem itself, is truly what the work is about. One cannot wholly repeat an experience, yet the poetry he creates as he grasps for the perceptual truth is breathtaking in and of itself.
The show was reminiscent of a biography of Robert Irwin, another artist who explores light and space, with a title that is particularly insightful into Finch's work: "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees." In creating his installations, Finch makes art that allows us to see ourselves in the process of seeing. We are painfully aware of the gap between our memories and the original perceptions that inspired them. Even so, Spencer Finch has made for us a space in which to reconcile the scientific truth with the beautiful aberrations of memory that make a remembered sunset brighter and old colors more beautiful.
Spencer Finch: "What Time Is It on the Sun?" runs at Mass MoCA through this spring.
