Playing with the past while examining the fault lines of memory

At Mass MoCA, Finch ponders limits of knowing

June 22, 2007|Ken Johnson, Globe Staff

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Culture is shaped as much by what is not known as by what is, and Finch's works track the blurry border between. Many people still wonder what really happened in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau pushed language to the limits of its ability to describe the ineffable. One of Finch's sculptures, an oval panel covered by rhinestones representing the color of the sky over Roswell, N.M., alludes to a place where some people believe beings from other, unknown worlds have visited.

Finch's lesson is that to be human is to be forever at the mercy of our merely human perceptions and beliefs. We may do our best to discover what truths are out there using the methods and tools of science, but we can never achieve a vantage point outside human consciousness from which we can objectively know the absolute truth about anything. To answer the question that gives Finch's exhibition its title, a question originally posed by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein , we cannot know what time it is on the sun. The only time we can hope to know is human time.

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.