Spencer Finch — Yvon Lambert Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 10 → July 2, 2011

Using light as his medium, Spencer Finch’s works deal with notions of perception and the experience of time. He keeps pursuing an ineffable moment where past and present, memory and instant meet; personal desire and world history collide.

After visiting loaded, historic places such as the cave of Lascaux, this new project relates to William Shakespeare play, Hamlet. Through an LED installation, Spencer Finch offers a sparkling fireflies night, each light playing a different character part, their intensity and movement representing each personality and move. Spencer Finch creates an atmosphere exalting mystery and fantasy — a dream place combining darkness and light, angst and delight. The arisen dichotomy is inspired by the 3rd act of Hamlet where the tension reaches its peak — the act shedding the light on the characters’ real nature, revealing its hero in the sublime of his existential contemplation (To be or not to be?) but also in the uttermost cruelty of his human condition.

Exploring through light the spiritual and emotional conflicts of each individual, Spencer Finch embraces a certain idea of romanticism and invites the audience to reflexion and introspection.

Spencer Finch is born in New Haven in Connecticut in 1962; he lives and works in Brooklyn. In 2007, his work featured in a retrospective at the MASS MoCA of North Adams, Massachusetts. Spencer Finch has a current exhibition at the Folkestone Triennal in the United Kingdom and his next 2011 exhibitions will take place at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, at the Indianapolis Museum in Indiana, and also at the Art Institute of Chicago Museum in Illinois.