THE VILLAGE VOICE
December 11-17, 2002
voice choices/shortlist
editor's pick
Spencer Finch
"From Things You Can't Remember to Things You Can't Forget" is an understated show. But, privileging process and invisibility, Finch's work always depends on a conceptual/perceptual twist. His 100 reticent Rorschach blots reveal colors from his dreams, instead of shapes from his unconscious. His photos, not in color, chase rainbows. And if his striped, fluorescent-tube ceiling installation, Eos (Dawn, Troy), isn't quite spectacular, the process of its making is. Traveling to legendary Troy, working with scientists to calibrate the light before sunrise, he recreated the precise color in these 75 standard fluorescent lights. Stand in the right spot and it radiates. (Levin)
TimeOut
New York
December 12-26, 2002
issue 376/377
(Steven Stern)
It turns out that Homer was wrong about the dawn: What the blind poet described as "rosy-fingered" is actually sort of bluish-lavender. So one gathers from Eos, an installation by Brooklyn-based artist Spencer Finch. In the front room of Finch`s latest exhibit at Postmasters, 79 fluorescent tubes are arrayed across the gallery`s ceiling, tricked up with multicolored filters calibrated to reproduce the precise light conditions that occurred at dawn on October 26, 2002, at the site of ancient Troy. The glow that fills the empty room is cool and strange, surprisingly un - Mediterranean in feeling. Despite the elaborately austere Minimalist trappings, the work functions as an absurdist joke, a doggedly literal-minded realization of some absent sublime.
The rest of the show rings changes on this theme: the ambiguous phenomena of color and light, existing not quite in the world, not quite in the mind. Finch`s work combines a nerdy exactitude with a screwball visual imagination, and his quasi-scientific explorations result in odd, lovely objects. He has rendered the blind spots in his eyes (the area where the optic nerve is connected to the eyeball) as a pair of rhinestone-encrusted ovoids - gaps in the artist`s vision reconceived as pure dazzle. Dream Colors is exactly what its title suggests: re-creations of specific colors from the artist`s dreams, done up as 102 framed Rorschach tests on paper. Abstracted from their sources, these blots seem like the beginnings of some imaginary - and utterly idiosyncratic - spectral psychology.
Perhaps the most telling work in the show is the humblest in execution. Two small black-and-white photographs are each framed with handwritten text: APPROXIMATE LOCATION OF THE RIGHT LEG OF A RAINBOW VIEWED FROM THE F TRAIN AT SMITH / 9 ST. OVERPASS, BROOKLYN, OCTOBER 24, 1999 3PM, reads one. The other documents the imagined location of the left leg. The pictures showes an anonymous corner bodega and a battered corrugated-metal garage door - nondescript non sites, unnoticed before an accident of optics marked them as significant. There`s a poignant Romantic core to Finch`s brand of deadpan Conceptualism. From ancient cities to his own unconscious, he`s always chasing rainbows.