Spencer Finch: Installation Following Nature
IMA - Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA
Through August 25, 2013
Indianapolis Museum of Art Commissioned Spencer Finch for Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion Series. Installation features suspended glass panels inspired by Claude Monet’s Giverny water garden
Brooklyn-based artist SPENCER FINCH (b. 1962 in New Haven, Conn.) create a new installation as part of the IMA’s Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion series of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Spencer Finch’s expansive new installation, Following Nature, is composed of an array of nearly 200 panels of glass suspended from the Pavilion’s ceiling, as a reinterpretation of Claude Monet’s iconic water garden in Giverny, France. Following Nature is on display since February 1 through August 25, 2013.
Inspired by a recent visit to Giverny, Spencer Finch has looked to the representation of water as a shaping influence for Following Nature, in particular Monet’s use of the water garden as a kind of laboratory for optical effects. Monet has served as an inspiration for Spencer Finch for more than 20 years, and the IMA’s installation is his second exploration of the garden in Giverny, following the 2012 exhibition of his work Painting Air at the Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design. Unlike Claude Monet’s representations of the garden through the two-dimensional medium of paint on canvas, Finch’s all-encompassing installation radically reinterprets this well-known site. The work comprise numerous glass panels of varying reflectivity, surrounded by a multi-hued field of translucent vinyl applied to the pavilion’s existing windows. Spencer Finch sourced the colors for the window vinyl from his photographs of the gardens, color samples taken on site, and pigment colors used by Monet.
The installation’s title is drawn from a letter written by Claude Monet to his friend Gustave Geffroy in 1889, in which Monet states, “In light of changes [in the weather] I am following nature without being able to grasp her, and then there is the river that shrinks, swells again, green one day, then yellow, sometimes almost dry, and which tomorrow will be a torrent, after the terrible rain that is falling at the moment.” Correspondingly, Spencer Finch’s Following Nature embody the garden as an evolving, spatial and optical experience rather than as a single moment in time. As light shifts across the work’s glass panels and the pavilion’s tinted windows, viewers are immersed in a sensory environment of changing kaleidoscopic reflections. The installation’s use of the pavilion’s windows also unite Spencer Finch’s impression of the Giverny gardens with the IMA’s own landscape and will obscure the division between inside and outside.
”Only Spencer Finch—one of contemporary art’s foremost creative minds—could transport a viewer from Indianapolis in February to Monet’s garden in Giverny at the peak of summer,” said Sarah Urist Green, curator of contemporary art.
Following Nature is part of the Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion series launched in February 2007 and made possible by a $2.5 million grant from the Indianapolis-based Efroymson Family Fund. The works are installed on a rotating basis with a new commission from a different artist approximately every six months. Artists who have previously exhibited in the space include Alyson Shotz, William Lamson, Orly Genger, Julianne Swartz, and Tony Feher, among others.
IMA - Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, USA
Museum's website: www.imamuseum.org
You can read previous posts about other Spencer Finch's exhibition by clicking on the tag "Spencer Finch" below.
You can read previous posts about other Spencer Finch's exhibition by clicking on the tag "Spencer Finch" below.
