Sabine Mirlesse — Crystalline Thresholds — Les Portes de givre — Divers lieux — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 27, 2022 → April 7, 2023

“The door to the invisible must be visible” René Daumal. Le Mont Analogue.

Crystalline Thresholds / Les Portes de Givre is a series of seven frozen passageways sculpted by the Atlantic winds in the winter of 2022/23 by artist Sabine Mirlesse. The ephemeral Land Art installation was inspired by the discovery of her grandfather’s engineering work on the behavior of frost on the mountain in the 1930s and is a nod to the Gallo-roman Temple of Mercury, place of pilgrimage for centuries at the top of the Chaine des Puy volcanoes, uniquely set above the mists and clouds. There are seven portals installed in the constellation of Pleiades, conceived and positioned to stimulate ice and frost formations growing larger only to melt with the arrival of spring. This work is Mirlesse’s first public art installation and is part of the Ministry of Culture’s Mondes Nouveaux program.

Sabine Mirlesse, born in the United States in 1986 has been working and living in France for the last decade. Her artistic research is centered around the visibility of thresholds and the interiority of landscape, with a particular interest in how geological sites are divined, interpreted, and recounted. Weaving her way through mineral narratives and cosmologies, Mirlesse’s multidisciplinary approach connects photography and geology as guardians of time. She is particularly interested in the ways earth materials and image fuse together to create geomantic readings.
Her creative practice is rooted in her background in literature and mysticism and manifests across an accumulation of layers and strata, completed by sculpture, installation, video and writing. This is her first public art work.