LAURA PHAN

Sverre Fehn, Prøvehus, Norrköping, 1992

Salvaged Refugee Life Vests Installation 

Cy Twombly - Il Parnasso, 1964, oil paint, wax crayon, lead pencil, colored pencil on canvas, 80 ¾ x 85 7/8

Cy Twombly, Untitled, Oil on paper relined on canvas

Spencer Finch, “Trying to Remember the Color of Jackie Kennedy’s Pillbox Hat" 

Saul Anton writes:

Finch is unafraid to inhabit the paradox that art exists in the play between language and perception. What many artists and theorists find unbearable, literally, the ‘speaking against itself’ implied in para-doxa, is for Finch less something to escape than the very condition necessary for his art practice. That is why his work demonstrates a Proustian interest in the difficulties and disappointments of recollection. He knows that color lies at the boundary of what we see and what we remember. Despite the thick red line of humor that runs through his work, Finch’s projects are always laced with the acute pathos of someone disappointed by both perception and language and by their mutual exclusivity and incompatibility. "There is always a paradox inherent in vision, an impossible desire to see yourself seeing. A lot of my work probes this tension; to want to see, but not being able to,” Finch says in a catalogue for a 1997 show at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT. Color is less a trope of indeterminacy than a way to re-create an almost visceral experience of our impossible desire to name our perceptions.