Wallworks
photo: Ira Schrank, Sixth Street Studio
PASSAGE THROUGH THE GRAND SPINNING DISC
(2009)
Chris Finley
b. 1971, Carmel, CA. Lives and works in Rohnert Park, CA.
Acrylic, ink on vinyl, string, wood, paint, and graphite on paper
30 x 140 feet
Courtesy of the artist
The art of Chris Finley immediately brings to mind Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2. (1912). The Duchampian influence is evident not only in his Cubist palette and his Futurist concern with movement, but also in matters beyond form. As Duchamp before him depicted the time-honored nude performing such a mundane action as walking down stairs, Finley depicts Guinness world record holders of insignificant accomplishments—the woman with the longest fingernails or the man who has skipped the most stones—glorifying these nonsensical deeds by portraying them in the elevated form of painting. By embracing the insubstantial, the artist champions Dadaist rejection of meaning, an idea further epitomized in his process and style. In a multiple-step procedure, he takes a photograph and digitizes it, or uses found imagery from the internet, manipulates it on the computer using a software program, reducing the photograph to abstruse lines, then paints it by hand. In this way, Finley takes the work in and out of real and virtual space resulting in information loss with each successive step and a breaking down of meaning. The end product is an abstract distortion in which the original image can no longer be read.
Using photographs of the Fumihiko Maki-designed bench and staircase in the lobby of YBCA as his source images, Finley applied his technique of alteration and created five paintings on the terrace walls. Incorporating the architecture into his work, the disc on the second floor is imagined as a lens that projects the wall paintings—carried by strings representing light beams—on to the columns, where wooden insects rest, and on to the wall above the main entrance. That main wall displays a combination of all five wall pieces, built up into a jumbled mass, and then reflects its shadow onto a neighboring wall. The lobby is thus surrounded by a panoply of entangled images with prominence given to the circular painting over the primary point of entry. Mirroring the shape of the disc, the tondi placed at the center of the wall transforms the structure into the pediment of a temple, but an updated one of Maki's modernist design. However, rather than venerating any deities or classical ideals it is conceived as a modern-day temple to meaninglessness.
Finley has had recent solo exhibitions at ACME, Los Angeles and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco. Select group exhibitions include, California Modern, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, and Eureka, The Eureka Fellowship Awards 2002-2004, Berkeley Art Museum. Finley was also a 1999 recipient of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Award.
— Thien Lam