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The Corcoran’s new contemporary gallery space, NOW at the Corcoran, launches with this inaugural exhibition by Spencer Finch, opening to the public on September 11. NOW at the Corcoran will feature an ongoing series of one- and two-artist exhibitions that presents new work addressing issues central to the local, national, and global communities of Washington, D.C., and that responds to the collection, history, and architecture of the Corcoran.

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 was born in 1962 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Hamilton College, and Doshisha University in Kyoto, and has exhibited internationally. Finch had a major one-artist exhibition, What Time is it on the Sun?, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007. His recent solo exhibition, As if the Sea Should Part and Show a Further Sea, was exhibited at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia in 2009. Finch was also included in the Making Worlds exhibition at the 2009 Venice Biennale, the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and has created several works of public art, including the recent project for the High Line in New York with Creative Time. His work is held in many museum collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.