Spencer Finch: My Business, with the Cloud

September 11, 2010–January 23, 2011

NOW at the Corcoran’s inaugural exhibition presents new work by Spencer Finch. Finch’s sculptural installations, photographs, and drawings seek to capture the elusive space between perception and the outside world, probing the intersections of science, nature, and memory. Using industrial materials to recreate individual experiences or particular sensations such as candlelight or the wind off of Walden Pond, he also draws from historical accounts by poets and philosophers to explore the persistence of human curiosity. Finch’s works play with light, color, and time to remind his viewers that looking is never as simple as it looks.

Finch’s exhibition at the Corcoran takes up the subject of clouds. Drawing from the history and environment of Washington, D.C., his project explores the poetic, physical, and meteorological aspects of these natural phenomena. Finch’s site-specific sculpture of a passing cloud in the museum’s central Rotunda alludes to a moment of convergence between two historical figures, Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln. In a selection of related photographs and drawings, Finch attempts to make something solid out of air, investigating the atmospheric and metaphoric properties of light, water vapor, and sky.

This is Finch’s first one-artist exhibition in Washington, D.C.

Spencer Finch: My Business, with the Cloud is made possible through the support of the Women’s Committee of the Corcoran, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation FUNd, and Steven M. Sumberg.