North Atlantic Ocean (April 14, 1912, 11:40pm), 2022
Dowels, tulle, chiffon, magnets
180 x 192 in.
457.2 x 487.7 cm
The monumental installation 'North Atlantic Ocean (April 14, 1912, 11:40 pm)', 2022, explores the space between sight and perception, creating a moment of dramatic departure from the mood established in...
The monumental installation 'North Atlantic Ocean (April 14, 1912, 11:40 pm)', 2022, explores the space between sight and perception, creating a moment of dramatic departure from the mood established in the first room of the exhibition. This ephemeral sculpture reconstructs the iceberg that sank the Titanic from four distinct eyewitness accounts, including drawings and photographs. As far as we know, no one actually saw the iceberg when it made contact with the boat, so all documentation of this notorious form was created after the fact. Finch constructs the crags and peaks of the looming iceberg from simple materials, creating depth, mass, and shadow through drapes and folds of tulle and chiffon. Finch’s interest in this historical moment of humanity’s tragic encounter with nature is rooted in his desire to find ways to describe the unknowable and the unseen. Finch has previously created historically based works that plumb the dissonances of collective remembrance–from the 1994 suite of watercolors 'Trying to Remember the Color of Jackie Kennedy’s Pillbox Hat' to his 2014 commission for the 9/11 Memorial Museum, 'Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning'. Like these earlier projects, 'North Atlantic Ocean (April 14, 1912, 11:40 pm)' is fundamentally about the interplay between objective and subjective ways of seeing, and the interpretive possibilities that derive from memory.