Light Fantastic

Spencer Finch Spencer Finch Summer in the City: Public Art High Line Hosts Elevated Soirée for Friends, Financiers ADAA Show Goes After Younger Audiences ADAA's Art Show Opens with Steady Sales A Day in the Life: Mickey Cartin

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What is the color of water? How do you capture the desert at twilight? What time is it on the Sun? Such are the ineffable effects that Spencer Finch sets out to embody in his multidimensional artworks. One of the Brooklyn-based artist’s three works on view at the Venice Biennale, Moonlight, shifts the color inside the Arsenale to the color of moonlight that he measured with a colorimeter one night from the roof of his hotel. Another biennale project, Moondust (Apollo 17), uses incandescent bulbs to re-create the molecular structure of moon dust gathered during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

"The work has to be about something, otherwise it’s just abstract," says the 46-year-old artist. "It has to have a connection to the world." And whether that connection is literary, scientific, atmospheric, or personal, it is very specific. In making 8,456 Shades of Blue (After Hume), Finch was inspired by a text in which the 18th-century Scottish philosopher and empiricist David Hume considers sensory perception and various shades of blue. "This is probably the only artwork made about him," says Finch with a slight laugh, but it makes perfect sense that this artist — whose works are scientific-poetic inquiries about the limits of perception and memory — would want to test the theory that all knowledge originates in experience.

Finch was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, and studied literature at Hamilton College, in upstate New York. He spent an academic year in Japan, where he worked with a potter. Finch took some art classes when he returned to Hamilton and, a few years after graduating, decided to apply to the ceramics program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), in Providence. "I got into RISD not because of my work but because of the essay I wrote," he says. "Clay people are not very articulate, so I think my essay sort of surprised [the admissions committee]." Once he got to RISD, Finch began experimenting with other mediums that were new to him, such as video, but at the time, specializing in one medium was the rule, and the faculty was not pleased. "After a year, they tried to kick me out," Finch says. He reapplied to the sculpture department and was admitted largely because at the time, it was his fellow students who were driving the admissions decisions, "and they had the majority of the votes," he notes.

Then, as now, he does not confine himself to any single medium or approach, utilizing photography, drawing, sculpture, and installation and employing diverse materials — such as glass and fluorescent light tubes coated with different colored gels, glowing video monitors, and, in one case, a cluster of helium balloons — to play with the imprecise nature of perception. Often his pieces give material form to the ephemeral and formless: sunlight, the weather, a breeze. One particularly lyrical work, Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004), 2004, uses white fluorescent lights behind a "cloud" made from crumpled sheets of blue theatrical gels, held together with clothespins and suspended from the ceiling, to approximate the light at the moment a cloud passed overhead the day he visited the house where the reclusive poet spent her life.

Site and concept are inseparable for Finch. For his large-scale window project, The River That Flows Both Ways, currently installed on the High Line, the elevated park on Manhattan’s West Side, Finch floated down the Hudson River in a boat for more than 11 hours and took 700 photographs of the surface of the water. The conditions he captured were translated into 700 panes of glass in hues ranging from greenish blue, pale aqua, and milky lilac to darker purples and almost black. Water, like glass, is both a mirror and a window — a duality analogous to that of the simultaneous up- and downstream flow of the river’s currents. The monumental piece — it’s more than 134 feet long — is scheduled to be on view until next summer. "I feel very lucky to be doing this," he says. "I tried for a few different public commissions, and I got this one, which was the one I really wanted."