Spencer Finch

CAFKA is thrilled to be co-hosting, with the University of Waterloo Department of Fine Arts, a lecture by internationally acclaimed artist Spencer Finch.

 


Spencer Finch has been celebrated for his recreations of naturally occurring colours and formations in gallery spaces. Influenced equally by art, science, and poetry, Finch employs complex analysis and meticulous techniques to transform everyday materials into “very complicated, monochromatic, landscape painting”.

 


In Sunlight in an Empty Room the artist used rigid plastic sheets and wooden clothespins to create what appears to be a sprawling abstract form floating in the gallery space.  Finch refers to this form as an “optical cloud”.  The sculpture’s shadow on the floor precisely recreates the shape, spectral quality, and intensity of the shadow of an actual cloud that he encountered in the garden of poet Emily Dickinson.

 


Spencer Finch, in truly revolutionary fashion, manifests traditional ideas in shockingly new ways, employing scientific method to a poetic end.  In a tradition that leads back to the Impressionists working in the late nineteenth century, artists have strived to depict the light surrounding objects, instead of depicting the objects as they are. A contemporary mash-up of Monet’s Water Lilies and Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tubes, Finch’s installations are neither purely pictorial nor conceptual but more like nature itself – beautiful and fascinating.