Shannon Finley 2021

SHANNON FINLEY

SHANNON FINLEY CASCADE

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

511 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

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SHANNON FINLEY’S HYPNAGOGIC BRAINSCAPES

By David Ebony

When I first saw the images of recent paintings by Shannon Finley that were to become part of his New York exhibition, Cascade, my initial excited reaction was—as I said to myself, “These look like hypnagogic brainscapes!” The arresting paintings that immediately triggered this response, Spirit Host and Castle Mind (2021, as are all works in this exhibition) feature triangles and diamond shapes in vivid colors that at first seem to harbor figures and faces embedded in, or at least suggested by, the allover networks of crystalline facets.

Delicate shading within some of the rectangles implies a slightly illusionistic space, in which sensuous, animate forms might be visible just below the surface, embedded within the carefully layered geometric structure. Overt anthropomorphic features have appeared in the hard-edge geometry of earlier Finley compositions, such as Ganon and Ghost Rider (both 2010). Spirit Host and Castle Mind, though, resist attempts to discern heads or hidden faces, as they emphatically demand to be read in terms of a rigorously abstract visual language of the artist’s invention. Despite the rigid geometry, the new compositions eventually reveal themselves to be rather like dynamic organisms, progeny born of the artist’s hallucinatory, hypnagogic vision. ***

Just a few days before this introduction to Finley’s recent work, I watched on a streaming service a Dick Cavett Show from 1971, with guests Salvador Dalí, Lillian Gish, and Satchel Paige. Soon after taking the stage, Dalí tossed his pet anteater onto Gish’s lap and settled into the interview. At one point, he informed Cavett that his paintings were actually hypnagogic images—those that appear ten

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Salvador Dalí, Cubist Self-Portrait, 1923 Oil and collage on cardboard on wood 41 x 29 1/2 inches (104 x 75 cm) Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid © 2021 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society

Salvador Dalí, Portrait of Gala looking onto the Mediterranean sea which from a distance of 20 metres is transformed into a portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Rothko), 1976 Oil on canvas 99 1/4 x 75 1/2 inches (252 x 192 cm) © Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, FL © 2021 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society

minutes before sleep, rather than the deep-sleep dreamscapes that the TV host had supposed.

Finley’s elegant, precisionist abstractions appear to correspond in some way to Dalí’s early Cubist works, like Cubist Self-Portrait (1923). And there’s also, perhaps, a distant relationship to certain of Dalí’s later optical puzzles, like Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at a Distance of 20 Meters Is Transformed into the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Rothko), of 1976.

Pablo Picasso, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910 Oil on canvas, 39 9/16 x 26 9/16 inches (100.4 x 72.4 cm) Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL © 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Finley’s paintings—super-realist rather than surreal—more emphatically assert an ancestry of classic Cubism, such as that found in works by Juan Gris, in early Fernand Léger paintings, in abstractions by the German artist Otto Freundlich, or in key paintings from Pablo Picasso’s Analytical Cubist period, such as the portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910) at the Art Institute of Chicago. Unlike the Surrealists’ and Cubists’ reimagining of the world, however, Finley’s geometricized imagery conveys a personal and interior exploration of the processes of illusion and perception.

The geometry in Finley’s paintings could be nature-based, perhaps like Mandelbrot’s fractals.1 While the artist’s approach is no doubt intuitive, over the years he seems to adhere to a consistent system of image-making that encompasses certain rules and guidelines that he established, albeit with many variables. His system appears to align with Paul Klee’s Bauhaus methodology, for instance, in which he assigns to abstract line and form some real-world

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Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook, 1925 Image courtesy of Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

attributes. As Klee notes in his Pedagogical Sketchbook of 1925, describing earth, water, and air: Symbols of the static area are plummet (position) and balance.

The plummet aims at the earth’s center where all materiallybound existence is anchored. But there are regions with different laws and new symbols, signifying freer movement and dynamic position. Water and atmosphere are transitional regions.2 Klee provides illustrative sketches to clarify his vision. Finley does not provide any such explicit road map, but his art indicates a viable lexicon just the same.

Works such as Lightfall and Matrix, featuring orderly rows of small, uniform diamond shapes and triangles, activated by dazzling shifts in color and translucence,

appear to harbor an esoteric, hermetic logic. Here, alternating—but rarely exactly repeated—sequences of rectangles in black, silver, green, blue, orange, and red (plus myriad variants of those tones) form a kind of rhythmical visual vocabulary.

Prolonged viewing of these compositions stimulates a poetic reverie of light and color. The critic Dore Ashton remarked in her compelling essay “In Praise of Illusion”: Reverie is essential to the creative artist, and certain poets (Poe, for instance) suggested that the hypnagogic state— that moment between waking and slumber—is the optimal condition for imagining.3 For some time, Finley, an Ontario-born (1974), Berlin-based artist (who has also lived in New York), has been engaged in refining an elaborate iconography of repeated geometric forms, with interwoven lines and gestures, rich textures, and nuanced color contrasts. The palette in the recent works is more intense than before. In Deep Web and Over Simulation, Finley directly addresses the digital and cryptic language of cyberspace, using irregular geometric shapes and penetrating, heightened color.

In painterly terms, he proposes in these two works a unique sort of virtual reality realm. Deep Web, among the largest of his recent works (approximately 8 by 6 feet), is an intricate, hyperactive composition composed of palimpsests of vivid hard-edge forms that crash and collide on the surface; it has the visual impact of a shattered glass wall. Occasionally, the artist allows smears and smudges of contrasting hues—not quite gestural markings—to disrupt the purity of the geometric units, especially along the edges of the canvas. These subtle interventions of painterly panache serve to further intensify the composition’s already energized surface.

Just as its witty title suggests, Over Simulation indicates an alternate reality, a simulacrum of some real-world structure, perhaps. Experimental buildings by the architects Peter Eisenman or Steven Holl come to mind. But Over Simulation

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also seems to offer a transcendental space. On some level, it could function like a restorative crystal, with meditative properties, and even bear the purported healing potential of certain crystals like labradorite. As the author Jennie Harding says in her book Crystals: In healing, labradorite is considered a powerful stone of magic and transformation, awakening supersensory abilities and the awareness of other states of energy . . . where healing is sought in parallel planes of existence by traveling between different states of consciousness. Labradorite’s silken sheen symbolizes the mysterious elusive qualities of these other realms of existence.4

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Likewise, the silken sheen of the surface of Over Simulation adds to the transcendental quality of the painting, and its possible allusion to parallel states of existence. This is true of the surfaces of many other Finley works. *** Finley alludes to interstellar space in works such as Cosmic Rays, Orbit Walker, Subspace, and Pathfinder. These canvases all feature circular shapes and semicircular disks that conjure images of celestial orbs—the movement of the stars and the planets, and phases of circumnavigating moons. In Pathfinder, eight wide, vertical bands of equal width, but in an array of translucent colors, function as a kind of armature for circular forms. Along these bands, the round and elongated circular shapes appear to ascend or descend in rhythmic patterns. Similarly, the four wide vertical bands in Subspace support overlapping orbs and elongated circles of deep blue, purple, and magenta that suggest a vertical thrust.

Orbit Walker has a more horizontal comportment, as a cosmic vista in which orbs and semicircles imply a lateral movement. The arrangement of bifurcated circles in this work—in pink and white, and gold and purple—calls to mind Gabriel Orozco’s Samurai Tree series of paintings, and intimates a similarly meditative aim. The orbs

in Cosmic Rays suggest a diagonal movement, as they pulsate along wide bands in alternating tones of hot pink, dark blue, and many other colors.

All of the images in this group of paintings have a finely calibrated pulse and rhythm. For Finley, this rhythmic sensibility and the pulsating attributes of the work are not simply parts of an exercise in optics. Instead, they come from within the artwork itself in a way in which the critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss describes “the visual” in one of her key essays, “The Im/pulse to See”: Yet the power of works that interest me here—in their contestation of what modernism had constructed as “the visual”—is that this beat or pulse is not understood to be structurally distinct from vision but to be at work from deep inside it.5 The power of Finley’s art arrives not only from the dazzling and mesmerizing play of light, color, and texture on each surface, but from a pulsating force that is felt by the viewer, although its source remains hidden. Emanating from just below the surface, in an unfathomable depth, there is an indefinable place full of life, light, rhythm, and energy. In this way, by means of these vibrant works that I like to call hypnagogic brainscapes, Finley offers viewers a unique reexamination and reimaging of reality.

David Ebony is a writer and curator. He is a contributing editor of Art in America, and was formerly the magazine’s managing editor. He writes the bimonthly column “David Ebony + Art Books” for Yale University Press online, and he has written numerous artists’ monographs. He lives and works in New York City.

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NOTES 1. See Benoit B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, W.H. Freeman and Co., New York, 1977/1983.

2. Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, 1925, trans. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (London: Faber and Faber, 1968) p. 47.

3. Dore Ashton, “In Praise of Illusion,” in The New Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1966), p. 115.

4. Jennie Harding, Crystals, (New York: Chartwell, 2017), p. 124.

5. Rosalind Krauss, “The Im/pulse to See,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Dia Art Foundation and Bay Press, 1988), p. 63.

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Castle Mind, 2021 Acrylic on linen 29 1/2 x 23 5/8 inches 75 x 60 cm

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Cosmic Rays, 2021 Acrylic on linen 29 1/2 x 23 5/8 inches 75 x 60 cm

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Deep Web, 2021 Acrylic on linen 94 1/2 x 78 3/4 inches 240 x 200 cm

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Lightfall, 2021 Acrylic on linen 78 3/4 x 63 inches 200 x 160 cm

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Matrix, 2021 Acrylic on linen 47 1/4 x 39 3/8 inches 120 x 100 cm

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Orbit Walker, 2021 Acrylic on linen 47 1/4 x 70 7/8 inches 120 x 180 cm

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Over Simulation, 2021 Acrylic on linen 78 3/4 x 63 inches 200 x 160 cm

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Pathfinder, 2021 Acrylic on linen 78 3/4 x 63 inches 200 x 160 cm

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Spirit Host, 2021 Acrylic on linen 78 3/4 x 63 inches 200 x 160 cm

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Subspace, 2021 Acrylic on linen 78 3/4 x 63 inches 200 x 160 cm

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SHANNON FINLEY Born in Ontario, Canada in 1974 Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

EDUCATION 1999 Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Canada

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2012 “Shannon Finley and Rupprecht Geiger,” Walter Storms Galerie, Munich, Germany “Century Entropy,” Bischoff Weiss Gallery, London, United Kingdom 2011 “Encrypted and Lost,” Galerie Christian Ehrentraut, Berlin, Germany

1998 The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Arts and Science, New York, NY

2010 Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Specters into Signals,” Galerie Christian Ehrentraut, Berlin, Germany

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2007 “Vector Love,” Kunst Klub, Berlin, Germany

2021 “Cascade,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “Rupprecht Geiger | Shannon Finley: Licht, Farbe, Raum,” Kunsthaus Kaufbeuren, Kaufbeuren, Germany 2020 “End of Line,” Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL 2019 “Convergence,” Walter Storms Galerie, Munich, Germany 2016 “INTERFERENCE,” Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, TX “Future Shock,” Culture Circle Gallery, Hamburg, Germany 2015 Walter Storms Galerie, Munich, Germany “Paintings for the Future,” Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, CA 2014 Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles, CA Vladimir Restoin Roitfield, New York, NY 2013 Maruani and Noirhomme Gallery, Brussels, Belgium

1999 “ex post facto,” Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, Canada 1997 “New Paintings,” Eye Level Gallery, Halifax, Canada “Walk the Line,” Khyber Center for the Arts, Halifax, Canada

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2021 Walter Storms Galerie, Munich, Germany (upcoming) 2019 “Shall we go, you and I while we can,” Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL 2018 “Tomorrow’s Dream,” Neuer Essener, Kunstverein, Essen, Germany 2017 “40 Years Walter Storms Galerie 1977 – 2017,” Walter Storms Galerie, Munich, Germany 2016 “Pioneer Lust,” Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, TX “Colouring the Edge,” 3812 Gallery, Hong Kong “Takashi Murakami’s Superflat Collection,” Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan

2015 “Appropinquation,” Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL 2014 “5 years schellingstr. 48,” Walter Storms Galerie, Munich, Germany “Shifting Optics,” Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands “White is the Warmest Color,” Hedge Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Neon-From glowing of art,” Stadtgalerie, Saarbrücken, Germany 2013 “Neon,” Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, Germany “Painting Forever!,” KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany “In the Studio,” Kunsthalle Athena, Athens, Greece “Photography, Reconstructed” (curated by Pavel Vancát), Prague Biennale, Prague, Czech Republic 2012 “Linie, Flache, Zeit, Ratskeller,” Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin, Germany “Abstract Confusion,” Städtische Galerie Gladbeck, Gladbeck, Germany and Kunsthalle Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany “Kaleidoscope,” C24 Gallery, New York, NY 2011 “Group Show,” Salon der Gegenwart, Hamburg, Germany “Abstract Confusion,” b05 – Kunst- und Kulturzentrum, Montabaur, Germany and Kunstverein Ulm, Ulm, Germany “Liquid Space,” Nettie Horn Gallery, London, United Kingdom “You Are Here: Berlin – Tokyo,” Berlin, Germany and Tokyo, Japan 2010 “Konstruktiv!,” Beck & Eggeling, Düsseldorf, Germany “Hostile Aestetik Takeover,” Appartement, Berlin, Germany “Alien Tourists Part 1, 2, 3,” The Forgotten Bar/Galerie im Regierungsviertel, Berlin, Germany “37 x Now,” The Forgotten Bar/Galerie im Regierungsviertel, Berlin, Germany

2008 “Forrest Gods,” Secret Garden, Berlin, Germany Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany 2007 “400 Blows,” After the Butcher/Galerie Thomas Kilper, Berlin, Germany “New Revolutionary Ghosts (Sandy Video),” Broadway 1602, New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA “Curse the Tainted Pharoa’s (Sandy Performance),” Galerie Meerrettich, Berlin, Germany “You are Here,” Eel Pie, Berlin, Germany Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany 2006 “Starting at the Edge,” Mushroom Arts, New York, NY 2005 “Three Black Minutes,” Autocenter, Berlin, Germany “NY Metro,” University of Pennsylvania, Clarion, PA 2004 “Super Salon,” Samson Projects, Boston, MA 2003 “Scope,” Dylan Hotel, New York, NY “Groundswell,” White Columns, New York, NY 2002 “Underground,” Pat Hearn Art Gallery, New York, NY 1998 “Monitor Goo,” Plug In Gallery, Winnipeg, Canada Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, Canada 1997 “The Hottest in Abstraction,” Khyber Center for The Arts, Halifax, Canada

SELECT COLLECTIONS Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA

2009 “wasistdas ‘09,” Paris, France “Spirits,” Stadtbad Wedding, Berlin, Germany

Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, Germany

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

SHANNON FINLEY CASCADE

1 April – 8 May 2021 Miles McEnery Gallery 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2021 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2021 David Ebony Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Photography by anna.k.o., Berlin, Germany Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue layout by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-45-8 Cover: Over Simulation (detail), 2021