Spencer Finch
West (Sunset in My Motel Room, Monument Valley, January 26, 2007, 5:36–6:06 PM), 2007
9 channel synchronised video installation
dimensions variable
The sun sets in the west. The ‘west’ in this title not only refers to the movement of our star, but also to the landscapes of the American West as documented in cinema, particularly Westerns.
Spencer Finch’s work is made up of nine tv screens, stacked in three by three and turned to face the wall. The screens display imagery from John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), set in Texas but filmed in Monument Valley, which straddles the Utah-Arizona border in Navajo Nation territory.
As the film plays, the light emitted and reflected off the wall gives the effect of a setting sun on a warm evening. As the title suggests, this reflects what Finch himself experienced when staying in Monument Valley.
Sunsets are often depicted in these types of films as a romantic and sublime characteristic of nature, perhaps evoking the search for the American Dream. However, the fading sun also casts a more critical light on the role cinema played in ‘normalising’ the colonisation of this land from the Indigenous peoples.
The work is included in Earthbound: Contemporary Landscape from the Roberts Institute of Art, an exhibition of works from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection and Sheffield's visual arts collection, on view at Sheffield Museums' Millennium Gallery until 31 October 2021.