Spencer Finch

Spencer Finch has been called a lot of things: a landscape artist, a minimalist, an abstract artist, a new media artist, a wizard, an optical ventriloquist. His installations and art in a wide range of media: drawings, light, and sculptures focus on vision, observation, and perception often through the transposition of qualities of light found at a culturally or historically charged site: a Scandanavian dusk possibly experienced by Ingmar Bergman or a sunset in Texas rendered as a 40 foot long grid of fluorescent bulbs. These are landscapes without landscape; they are scenes with only light, color, and text (the captions tell us which precise experience is recorded). Technology allows him to quantify and reproduce an aesthetic communion with a cultural past to render an experience on the borders of perception. My Own Personal SETI (2001), is an inversion of his usual process. Instead of providing us a translation of a temporal subjective remembered experience of light, time, and atmosphere in a historical moment, Finch gives us a seat in which to imagine ourselves searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. But we are not the scientists of the SETI project; instead we are living-room seekers, descendents of ET, Orwell’s Mars invasion, and Mork and Mindy. The possible sound or vision of alien communication is conspicuously absent; all that is left is the place we might occupy in searching for the invisible.

Return to Artists page