Spencer Finch: The Western Mystery

The serene beauty and subtle enjoyment of a sunset is one of nature’s greatest gifts. It connects us to our surroundings, as we take pause from our daily lives and admire the shifting color of the sky.

Brooklyn, New York-based artist Spencer Finch has dedicated his career to the perception of light and color, often recreating natural elements such as sunsets, forests, or waterways into unconventional, artistic forms.

His latest installation at Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, celebrates the park’s 10thanniversary with a piece that relates to the site and landscape. To create the piece, Spencer Finch drew inspiration from dozens of images of sunsets taken from the site, overlooking Puget Sound. From this, he selected the most representative colors and re-envisioned them on glass.

The piece, titled The Western Mystery, is composed of 90 square panes of glass in three different sizes and sixteen different colors. To create the glass panels, Goldray Glass worked directly with Spencer Finch’s team, matching selected Pantone colors in shades of pink, orange, yellow and blue on a film, which was then laminated between glass.

To achieve the desired color palette, Goldray’s team developed several glass samples in various shades, which Spencer and his team layered and compared before selecting the final sunset hues.

Each panel is hung individually, allowing them to move and twist freely, creating layers of color and adding interest for viewers. Spencer Finch has used glass as a medium to bring his projects to life for years.

Glass is unique in the way it interacts with the space, adding color, light, movement, and shine as light pours in through the surrounding windows and bounces off each panel. 

The Western Mysteryexplores “optical mixes of light and color…creating a prismatic experience that will be constantly changing” says Finch. And change it does, with every shift in light, time of day, and with each season, encouraging museum visitors to look closely and visit often.

The Western Mystery opened in March 2017, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Olympic Sculpture Park, and will be on view until March 3, 2019.

Goldray Glass was thrilled to have been a part of bringing Spencer Finch’s vision to life and we continue to work on many exciting projects with his team.

Check out another Spencer Finch design for Amazon’s Seattle headquarters that was fabricated by our team at Goldray Glass.