Spencer Finch is a transdisciplinary artist that blends scientific methods to showcase wind, sun, memory, and visual perception through pastels, watercolors, photography, glass, sculpture, and light installations. His art is holistic and transcendent. He focuses on popular sites, such as the High Line, Central Park, and the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York. He sets up his installations so that the audience perceives through the lenses of history, nature, literature, and personal experience in poetic ways. Finch investigates the things we may not be conscious of, such as the sky’s color at one minute and the changes that occur. His works can “ignite our capacity for wonder”.

For example, in The River that Flows Both Ways, a permanent installation at the High Line at the Chelsea Market, comprises of 700 panes of glass representing the water conditions over 700 minutes in a single day. When in New York, be sure to see this; I’m sure it will expand your mind to the possibilities of light dancing across moving water and the reflection back of its myriad of hues.

Spencer Finch was the only artist commissioned to create a new work for the National September 11 Memorial Museum. His installation named Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning which comprises of 2,983 watercolors on Fabriano paper. Each watercolor represents a person who was lost that clear blue day—as Virgil said, “No day shall erase you from the memory of Time”. Time and our individual perceptions have distorted the color of the sky, imprinted by the memories of thousands. Finch said about this piece, “As an artist, I don’t feel like my motives are always pure. But I feel that they’re pretty pure here. I’m a New Yorker, and I was here that day”.

Color Test (225) comprises a light box overwhelming the viewer with color. Two transparent layers of checkerboard colors of various hues transform the white light in the box to 225 different colors. Most researchers estimate most humans can see around one million different colors. In Rose Window at Saint Denis (Morning Effect), Finch measured the natural light at that window with a colorimeter to determine the neon colors used in tubes. The piece serves as a memory of that place at another time and in another place. Much like Claude Monet, he was more interested in how light played on his subject, rather than the subject itself.

In The Secret Life of Glass, Finch creates an annual event every February 24^th at the Corning Museum of Glass. The large 28 x 12 foot glass shows the range of temperature across the surface. For every 4 degrees of temperature, he assigned a Matisse color.

In May and June 2015, Sunset (Central Park) was used to make and give away free sunset-colored ice cream made in a solar and battery-powered truck. Finch duplicated this event at Art Basil Miami the next December. He designed the project to start conversations about renewable clean energy.

Spencer Finch is an aesthetic polymath known all over the world in museums and represented by the following galleries: James Cohan, Rhona Hoffman, Lisson, and Nordenhake. Find Finch’s website here.

PLEASE SEE PORTFOLIO BELOW