At the core of Spencer Finch’s practice is an ongoing investigation into the nature of light, color, memory, and perception. By utilizing a range of media from painting, drawing, photography, and installation, Finch transforms his own observations of a particular time or place into form. With both a scientific approach to gathering data and a true poetic sensibility, Finch’s installations lie between the objective investigations of science and the subjectivity of perception and lived experience, endowing his work with a melancholy that comes from what Finch describes as “the impossible desire to see oneself seeing.”

His talk accompanies Public Art Fund’s ambitious new exhibition Lost Man Creek, which embodies Finch’s poetic sensibility and investigation into nature’s power to awe and inspire. The installation, a 1:100 scale living recreation of a 920-acre section of the Redwood National Park in California, will be installed at MetroTech Commons for two years.

Finch’s talk at the New School will focus on the artist’s various public and large-scale installations like A Certain Slant of Light (2014-15), a site-specific installation at the Morgan Library inspired by its collection of medieval Books of Hours; Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning (2014), a commission for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum composed of 2,983 individual watercolors representing the artist’s recollection of the sky on September 11, 2001; Painting Air (2012), an installation of more than 100 panels of suspended glass inspired by the colors of Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny; and The River That Flows Both Ways (2009), a permanent installation on New York’s High Line featuring an existing series of windows which Finch transformed with 700 individual panes of glass representing the water conditions on the Hudson River over 700 minutes in a single day.

At the core of Spencer Finch’s practice is an ongoing investigation into the nature of light, color, memory, and perception. By utilizing a range of media from painting, drawing, photography, and installation, Finch transforms his own observations of a particular time or place into form. With both a scientific approach to gathering data and a true poetic sensibility, Finch’s installations lie between the objective investigations of science and the subjectivity of perception and lived experience, endowing his work with a melancholy that comes from what Finch describes as “the impossible desire to see oneself seeing.”

His talk accompanies Public Art Fund’s ambitious new exhibition Lost Man Creek, which embodies Finch’s poetic sensibility and investigation into nature’s power to awe and inspire. The installation, a 1:100 scale living recreation of a 920-acre section of the Redwood National Park in California, will be installed at MetroTech Commons for two years.

Finch’s talk at the New School will focus on the artist’s various public and large-scale installations like A Certain Slant of Light (2014-15), a site-specific installation at the Morgan Library inspired by its collection of medieval Books of Hours; Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning (2014), a commission for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum composed of 2,983 individual watercolors representing the artist’s recollection of the sky on September 11, 2001; Painting Air (2012), an installation of more than 100 panels of suspended glass inspired by the colors of Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny; and The River That Flows Both Ways (2009), a permanent installation on New York’s High Line featuring an existing series of windows which Finch transformed with 700 individual panes of glass representing the water conditions on the Hudson River over 700 minutes in a single day.