Spencer Finch: Not precisely knowing, Not precisely knowing not

Inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem, The Angle of a Landscape, Finch has created a series of 31 photographs documenting his first perspective on waking each day, throughout the month of October.  Whether this be on an aeroplane, in a hotel room or at home, before sunrise or later in the day, he endeavours to capture the moment between sleep and wakefulness, the space between consciousness and unconsciousness - a perceptual landscape of experience.  The resultant images initially appear abstract but on closer inspection are revealed as, for example, the corner of his bedding, a pillow or a chest of drawers.  Installed in a single, multi-panel grid, the images function like the pages of a visual diary.

Between 2000 and 2002, in the hope of creating a work about colour that could circumvent his perceptual apparatus, Finch kept a diary in which he recorded the colours from his dreams.  It is to this diary that Finch returns for his new, large watercolour.  Fascinated by the concept of mapping dreams and of attempting to capture the memory of colour, Finch has made a grid comprising 49 vertical and 69 horizontal coloured lines at one-inch intervals.  Each horizontal line is taken from this dream-colour diary and each vertical line relates to a colour remembered from early childhood: the colour of the house steps; his toy phone; a couch his parents owned; their first car and the teacups they used.  On the one hand, a memory of an actual colour and, on the other, a memory of an imagined, dreamed colour.