Ariane Labbé

Find/Center Search/Circumference Find/Center

Presenting a body of works consisting of three kinetic sculptures, or a sequence of perpetual actions: finding is in the center, searching is in the circumference, finding is in the center,. The machines, or tools, interact with geological objects and converse with them as a body would; both or either from the maker's desire to remove their body from an action, and/or of the machine's capability to do it more precisely and efficiently. They are embodying a curiosity and contemplation of time and movement, of its residual, the small, “smallness to as when we attend to the infinite divisibility of matter […] and the still diminishing size of existence.” (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful).

““Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” (Blaise Pascal)Think of an alternate approach in which everything in nature is capable of its own experience. Looking at nature, we usually miss nature looking back—looking at itself, looking elsewhere—that is if anything even needs to be looked at, at any given moment. Indifference is something we struggle to live with, so we make stories. If correlations exist, I do not know about. But as I stand on the shore, the horizon draws a clear line; the horizon looks back at me, I must be a tiny speck. I know that size is relative, I just do not feel it. When I was a child, my cousin made me believe a boulder grew from a grain of sand. I could not witness this phenomenon because I was still too young. Maybe when I got older I could. That was my first geology lesson. For a few years after, I knew rocks grew, and so they grew.This body of work is a set of tools that allow the exploration of overlaps between edges of experiences that are so different yet so closely related, to acknowledge them, and perhaps something more? They are qualitative tools rather than quantitative; they utilize feelings of sublimity experienced in front of geological objects and their time, their inevitable road toward entropy, a reflection of our own destination.This search and find—because of the finite capabilities of perception and consciousness—can only be done in small increments of eternal repetition; sequences of actions fueled by an ongoing curiosity. To find, centered, and to search, at the periphery of what we know. And to find, holding and taking within, and to search, extending to the circumference. We first find, because it propels us to search, searching, maybe, to find again. ”