Spencer Finch

“Light, Time, Chemistry,” Rhona Hoffman Gallery

Time Out Chicago / Issue 215 : Apr 9–15, 2009

A chilly breeze flows over your face as you stand at the mouth of Spencer Finch’s periscope to view a reflection of the Chicago sky. Ventilation ducts connect the world outside—the light from the overcast sun, the smell and sounds of the street—to the enclosed environment of Rhona Hoffman’s gallery in Finch’s site-specific installation Periscope (sky over Chicago, 3/26/09–3/27/09). The piece includes a cyanotype (a cyan-blue photograph that develops in sunlight) applied directly to the wall that records the light at this specific time and place.

Light and its association with memory are practically obsessions for Finch. In Shadow, Sculpture of Centaur, Tuileries (After Atget) (pictured), the only one of his notable fluorescent-light sculptures on display, the American artist combines differently colored fluorescent bulbs to re-create the exact tone and level of light in a famous image by the late French photographer Eugène Atget.

Finch’s own photographs force us to meditate on the fleeting, barely perceptible elements of everyday experience. By taking photos at set intervals over a period of time, as in Lemon Tree (Spain, 6/27/07, 8am–7pm) and the 60-photo piece Thank You, Fog —shot in Sonoma County, California, over a single hour—he helps us to understand what it means to live in a particular environment at a particular moment.

Finch’s investigations into the mechanics of photography—especially Shadow…—suggest, incredibly, that light is more tangible than we thought. Bathing its corner of the gallery in a soft glow, Shadow… allows us to share Atget’s early-20th-century light in real time.

-CW