Selected Works

Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce Mutations, an exhibition of new paintings by Shannon Finley, on view 26 June - 15 August. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated digital publication featuring a text by Sebastian Preuss.

Over several decades, Shannon Finley has perfected a unique visual language of layered luminous fields and cascading geometries. At first glance, they suggest polygonal blueprints, or nets of three dimensional objects rendered in mid-collapse. Though, there is a glossy, dew-like quality to these works, a roughness around the edges that makes their mechanistic perfection feel strangely naturalistic. Each composition does not feel constructed but cultivated; a self-propagating organism rather than a finalized object.

However, Finley’s paintings are anything but spontaneous; they emerge from a highly controlled, months-long iterative process. He begins by building geometric shapes on the canvas, then transfers an image to the computer to experiment with the next layer—exploring new combinations of color and form—before returning to the canvas to render the evolved composition in paint. This analog-digital cycle repeats multiple times, with the final image gradually emerging from an amalgam of five to ten painted layers.

Though marked by precision and intention, Finley resists imposing meaning on the works; his hypnotic images are not fixed, but allow viewers to construct their own perceptions from within the haze. In Finley’s own words, his “focus is on finding a language that functions for everyone.” Critic Sebastian Preuss notes, “his pictures grant viewers the freedom to look and think, a salutary prerogative in an art world that is increasingly dominated by multiple obsessive discourses. Geometry does not provide the content of Finley’s works, but it can be used as a structure into which his everyday visual experiences, as well as feelings and moods, flow.”