Through an intensive process, Shannon Finley applies numerous, translucent layers of acrylic paint and industrial polymers onto canvas with specially designed palette knives. The results offer prism-like surfaces whose subtle nuances chronicle the build up of the material itself. This process draws from the history of geometric abstraction in painting as much as the reductive language of early computer graphics. But Finely eschews any simple opposition between the hand and the pixel, exploring instead the optics of the picture plane while constantly emphasizing the limits of the edge, which provide an unexpected archive of his painterly layers. Ultimately, these compositions remain suspended between the immaterial and the concrete, and are best apprehended as passageways into indeterminate spaces. In this, Finley invokes traces of sacred geometries and religious architecture within a technocratic context, but only as an alternate mode for engaging the unseen. (via)
