Spencer Finch »Sunset in a Cup«

The exhibition evokes specific moments, places and events by recreating colour and light gathered using scientific instruments or personal observations. Titled after Emily Dickinson’s poem “Bring me the sunset in a cup”, Finch presents works that celebrate and explore iterations of sunlight, and not least, sunset, with a suite of new photographs, works on paper, a light sculpture, and a seminal video installation from 2007.

Recent works on paper inhabit the gallery entrance: Sunlight on the Gowanus Canal; As blind men learn the sun Passing cloud on my body - (shadow/sun); and Western Mystery (She sweeps with many-colored Brooms) (all 2024). In his laboratory-like studio Finch endeavours to capture the elusive nature of light, at the same time acknowledging the inherent charms of our inability to adequately render natural phenomena. Three gold-leaf drawings Sunlight on the Gowanus Canal recreate the shimmering dance of the sun reflected in the murky industrial canal nearby his Brooklyn studio. Western Mystery (She sweeps with many-colored Brooms) recreates a changing sunset by gluing colored yarn on gesso, much like an action painting. The diptych As blind men learn the sun Passing cloud on my body - (shadow/sun) is as rigorous as it is contradictory: it is both a self-portrait and a visual rendering of the warmth of the sun as felt on different parts of the artist’s body. Using an infrared thermometer to measure his surface temperature under passing clouds and sunshine, Finch uses "false color" to reveal what we cannot see.

Finch has made well over a dozen works inspired by Dickinson’s poetry, as well as over six projects resulting from research at the Dickinson residence. The series of 23 unique prints, Sunset in a cup, brings yet another dimension to the artist’s exploration of Dickinson’s poetry and legacy. In vintage ornamental porcelain teacups, of the same era that Dickinson herself collected, Finch has swirled wet on wet paint to conjure miniature tableaus of sunsets. As ephemeral as their subject, these paintings only prevail in their photographic record. The light work Spring Haiku (Bamboo Grove, Arashiyama) radiates its colors onto the walls and vaulted ceiling of the gallery in its own room. In this signature mode, Finch uses color filters on lamps to reproduce the exact quality of late afternoon sunlight from a visit to the famed bamboo grove in Kyoto, Japan, using the written haiku structure of 17 moras distributed as 5/7/5 over three vertical lines.

West (Sunset in my motel room, Monument Valley, January 26, 2007, 5:36-6:06 pm), is a video-installation from 2007. This seminal work has been extensively published and included in his retrospective at the MASS MoCA (2008), and the group show Earthbound: Contemporary Landscape from the Roberts Institute of Art, and was first presented to a Swedish audience in the same year at the gallery Brändström & Stene. In West Finch reenacts the fading sunset as measured from a motel room in Monument Valley using the reflected light of interchanging stills on screens from the John Ford Western classic “The Searchers” over the course of thirty-five minutes. John Wayne lived in the motel for the filming of the movie in 1956. In this starkly poetic and sensory work the brut physicality of nine analog television monitors contrasts with the etherial evocation of dusk falling on a remote motel in another era.