Art Review

Spencer Finch: Light, Time, Chemistry

Spencer Finch's show at Rhona Hoffman Gallery is a photo based exploration of the processes and interactions of light, time, and chemistry-- three variables inherent in the practice of traditional photography. The work aims to capture and re-contextualize the ephemerality of these elements in our surroundings and explore the phenomenology of their experience. The tone of the show is set by Periscope, which dominates the front room of the gallery and addresses all three processes simultaneously. Periscope is a photographic device composed of mirrors and ventilation ducts extending from outside and ending in front of an interior gallery wall directly onto which a cyanotype was made from a two day exposure of the Chicago sky. A cyanotype is one of the earliest forms of fixing an image through light, and its use here creates an interesting connection between historical processes and present experience. The resulting image is a hazy blue and white (blue because of the chemicals used in cyanotypes), not really a pictorial image at all, but rather an impressionistic record left by the light. The cyanotype is representative of how Finch handles time throughout the show-- whether capturing the ephemeral either by condensing it by long exposure or parsing it out into exposures at intervals-- the presence of time is of central importance, more important even than the image itself.
Shadow, Sculpture of Centaur, Tuileries (After Atget), turns time back on itself in a way by reconstructing an ephemeral quality of light from a photographic source. This piece is a fluorescent tube light covered at different intervals with colored filters designed to act as a reverse prism to re-create the light in a particular Atget photo of Paris in the corner of the gallery. The notion of re-creating something so fleeting from a photograph reverses the relation of light and photography. Photography is always, in its essence, a picture of light, but in this case, light is reacting to a photograph in a way that rarely if ever happens. This piece also brings the historical into the present, in a more subjective way than the cyanotype does. It begins to address Finch's interest in the difficulties and disappointments of recollection by blurring the line between preset reality, memory, and documentation of the past.
Shadow... shares the quality of Finch's better work in the way it addresses the specific medium of photography and plays with our understanding of the purpose of photography as a medium. Another work which succeeds in this area is Thank You, Fog, a series of sixty images from a stationary camera shot at one minute intervals as fog rolls over a densely wooded landscape. The images wrap the full length of a room, and each one is almost the same yet slightly different as the fog exposes or conceals different parts of the image. Ultimately, no one photo could be deemed a more complete representation than any other, reflecting Finch's interest in the "anti-image", the fact that none of the sixty pictures give us a full picture of the landscape. Even setting up the camera in a mechanically operated way to take photographs at pre-specified intervals, each image ends up being subjective by it's very definition of being a single moment in time. We can get an impression of the landscape, but no definitive description.
Hidden behind the curators desk is One Donut Twelve Times, Twelve Donuts One Time, a work that addresses the subjectivity of photography in relation to light as opposed to time. Donuts... is a diptych, each side of which is a gridded montage of just what the title states. On one side, twelve different donuts, shot in a standardized manner look remarkably interchangeable from a distance, while on the other side, one donut shot at varying angles, exposures, and lighting look in fact like twelve different donuts. This extremely simple idea highlights the amount of impact even the most basic interpretations on the photographers part can have on the resulting image. Of all Finch's show, this work is arguably the most literal in its portrayal of an actual pictorial image. However, it is also extremely relevant, especially with the advent of digital imaging and a reassessment of photography's value. What Donuts... reveals is the amount of interpretation that even the most basic image is subject to, thereby questioning photography's innate "truth", regardless of the capability of digital manipulation.
Finch's work is in sum a series of impressions blending light, time, and chemistry together. The least successful work in the show is in fact that which comes closest to documenting the ephemeral without recognizing that such documentation inherently negates this very quality. For example Lemon Tree (Spain 6/27/07, 8am-7pm), in which the tree is photographed at different times of day ends up feeling more like a simple painterly exercise or one we have seen before and much better in the likes of Monet's haystacks. Although at times, the show felt slow and needlessly repetitious (I'm not sure the sixty photographs of Thank You, Fog substantially more effective than thirty would have been), I could not help but believe this was a conscious effect generated by the work, and in a way it did allow for the processes of memory and perception and present to overlap in the viewing. In the end, it is really the very failure of Finch's work to capture ephemerality that speaks the most about the nature of perception and places his work on the border of experience and memory.