Background
Spencer Finch was born in 1962 in New Haven, Connecticut, United States.
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Spencer Finch was born in 1962 in New Haven, Connecticut, United States.
After attending The Hotchkiss School, he graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in comparative literature from Hamilton College in 1985. Finch then pursued an Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1989.
Finch produces work in a wide variety of mediums, including watercolor, photography, glass, electronics, video, and fluorescent lights. He is perhaps best known for dealing with the elusive concepts of memory and perception through light installations. After measuring with a colorimeter the light that exist naturally in a specific place and time, Finch's re-constructs the luminosity of the location through artificial means. For example, "Moonlight (Luna County, New Mexico, July 13, 2003)", replicates the exact light of the full moon that shone over the desert of Luna County, New Mexico on the evening of July 13, 2003.
Creative Time, Friends of the High Line, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation commissioned "The River That Flows Both Ways" to Spencer Finch as the inaugural art installation for the High Line Park. The work is integrated into the window bays of the former Nabisco Factory loading dock, as a series of 700 purple and grey colored glass panes. Each color is exactly calibrated to match the center pixel of 700 digital pictures, one taken every minute, of the Hudson River, therefore presenting an extended portrait of the river that gives the work its name. Creative Time worked with the artist to realize the site-specific concept that emerged when he saw the rusted, disused mullions of the old factory, which metal and glass specialists Jaroff Design helped to prepare and reinstall.
Finch was chosen to create the only work of art commissioned for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. For his work, "Trying To Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning", Finch hand-painted 2,983 squares of Fabriano paper — one square in a unique shade of blue for every person killed in the September 11 attacks and in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The first retrospective of his work, which ended in March 2008, was assembled at MASS MoCA in North Adams. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
Spencer Finch is best known for ethereal light installations that visualise his experience of natural phenomena. His investigations into the nature of light, color, memory, and perception manifest in watercolors, drawings, video, and photographs. Finch is famous for producing large-scale sculptural installations that filter or transform natural light or create synthetic light effects.
Forty-Eight View of Lochness
1997102 Colors from My Dreams
2002Lake Whitingham Vermont July 20 2002 (morning effect)
2002Winter Light
2003White (Niagara Falls Obscured by Mist, April 17th, 2006, 5-30 PM)
2006Shadow, Sculpture of Centaur, Tuileries (after Atget)
2007Paper Moon (Studio Wall at Night)
2009Thank You, Fog
2009The River That Flows Both Ways
2009Paths through the Studio
2012Following Nature
2013Trying To Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning
2014Compelled by what he describes as ‘the impossible desire to see oneself seeing’, Finch holds up an enchanting prism between the outer world and inner thought. He distills his observations of the world into glowing abstract color but also diverts them through cultural and historical filters.
Quotations: “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.”
Quotes from others about the person
Contrary to what one might expect, 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.
