Providence, Rhode Island
Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design
In homage to Monet, Spencer Finch titled his recent exhibition “Painting Air.” A quotation from the Impressionist painter, the phrase also riffs on the familiar description of Impressionism as “painting light,” though “sculpting” air might have been more accurate in Finch’s case. Along with a major new installation, he showed such conceptual conceits as Nine Melting Snowflakes—a blank sheet of paper on which (we have to take his word for it) nine flakes of snow landed and melted on December 31, 2008—and an ice machine that ejects ice cubes into a pool whose intense blue (he says) replicates the sky he saw while standing on a New Zealand glacier.…see the entire review in the print version of December’s Sculpture magazine.
