October 23, 2004 - November 20, 2004
Spencer Finch
“As much of noon as I can take between my finite eyes”
Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of new works by Spencer Finch. The show will open October 23 and will be on view until November 20, 2004.
Spencer Finch's new show is titled " As much of noon as I can take between my finite eyes." It includes work in a wide range of materials and techniques that explores color, light, memory, and perception. Finch's interest in the tension between the objective nature of science and the subjectivity of perception generates a wildly diverse body of work. In this exhibition it ranges from an obsessive analysis of butterflies that are mistaken for falling flowers, to an improbable convergence of Nabokov and Heisenberg, to a light study created during a stake-out of a famous Swedish filmmaker's apartment.
"Abecedary" is a mural-size ink drawing in which the artist applies Vladimir Nabokov's theory of a colored alphabet to 12 essential pages of Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The result is 36 panels containing 9,251 different colored ink drops, each standing for a specific letter: a precise but indecipherable interpretation of the classic text on the impossibility of knowledge.
At the gallery entrance there will be a stained glass installation in which Finch precisely filters the noon light of New York City to re-create the bluish light of the "magic hour" in Stockholm one evening in May 2003, when he stalked Ingmar Bergman outside his apartment. The configuration of the glass panels will be adjusted to respond to the seasonal change of light during the course of the exhibition.
The show's title comes from the Emily Dickinson poem "Before I got my eye put out." The second gallery will be devoted to a monumental light installation in which the artist re-creates both the daylight and the shadow cast by a passing cloud in the poet's back yard in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Since his last exhibition at Postmasters in 2002, Spencer Finch has had solo exhibitions at Portikus in Frankfurt, Germany and at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas. He participated in the 2004 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art and is currently included in "Nothing Compared to This" at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. Among his upcoming projects is a collaboration with the choreographer William Forsythe that will open in Frankfurt and Dresden in April 2005