Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce The Brain — is wider than the Sky — – an exhibition of new works by Spencer Finch. The show will be on view from October 24 until November 28, 2009. The reception is scheduled for Saturday, October 24, between 6 and 8pm.

In the three new projects that comprise The Brain — is wider than the Sky — Finch continues to explore the nature of color, light, memory and perception.

366 (Emily Dickinson’s Miraculous Year) is based on the year 1862, Emily Dickinson’s annus mirabilis, when she wrote an amazing 366 poems in 365 days. Finch has created a candle sculpture, a real-time memorial to that year, which burns for exactly one year. The sculpture is comprised of 366 individual candles arranged in linear sequence, each of which burns for 24 hours. The color of each candle matches a color mentioned in the corresponding poem; poems in which no color is mentioned are made out of natural paraffin. On each day of the exhibition a new candle will be ignited from the previous candle as it burns out.

The Shield of Achilles (Night Sky over Troy 1184 B.C.) is a three-dimensional, illuminated star map of the night sky as it appeared during the siege of Troy. This star map, comprised of 384 cans hanging from the ceiling, each illuminated by a single light bulb and punctured with a small hole representing a single star, is based on the Almagest, Ptolemy’s original catalog of the 48 constellations named by the ancient Greeks. The magnitude and wavelength of each star is accurately depicted by the color of the light and the size of the pinhole. The hanging height of each star is determined by its distance (in light years) from earth.

In Paper Moon (Studio Wall at Night) Finch precisely re-creates the shadows cast on his studio wall by exterior streetlights and passing cars. It is a very boring piece and clearly not for everyone.

Since his last exhibition at Postmasters in 2007, a large survey exhibition of Spencer Finch’s works What Time Is It on the Sun? was presented by MassMOCA. Most recently he was included in Making Worlds at the 53rd Venice Biennale and his installation The River That Flows Both Ways opened at The High Line in New York in June 2009. Among Finch’s upcoming projects is the set design for the premiere of Philip Glass’s American Four Seasons, to be performed by violinist Robert McDuffie with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in December 2009 and the lighting design for a new project by choreographer William Forsythe in Frankfurt in 2010.