re.riddle

Boris Labbé: wandering threads

March 8, 2025 - April 12, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 8th from 5-8pm

Gallery Hours: Tues - Sat 11am - 5pm
Minnesota Street Project, Room 204
1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco

re.riddle is pleased to present Wandering Threads, a solo exhibition of new work by Boris Labbé. The opening reception is on Saturday, March 8 from 5-8pm. The exhibition runs through April 12, 2025.

Accompanying the exhibition will be an artist talk: In Conversation: Boris Labbé x Wade Wallerstein, co-presented with Villa Albertine, on Wednesday, April 2nd from 5-7pm at1275 Minnesota St, SF.

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Through text, textiles, and textures, Boris Labbé’s Wandering Threads explores the principles and properties of weaving as a metaphor for life itself. For Labbé, the concept of threads extends beyond the functional, offering instead a symbolic framework: the knotted disarray of life’s messy emotions, its nonlinear trajectories, entangled conflicts, and tensile resolutions. The thread supersedes the line, the most foundational element of drawing. If drawing is traditionally conceived as a bounded act—a mark made on a surface, an image enclosed within its edges—Labbé insists on its instability. Neither his lines nor drawings settle into fixed compositions; instead, they function as drawn threads that proliferate, expand, unravel, and overlap. 

In addition to the works on paper, Wandering Threads also features Labbé’s seminal installation Ito Meikyū, an animated virtual reality experience co-produced by Sacrebleu Productions, Les Films Fauves and Parangon that was awarded the Grand Prix at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. 

The work’s title is an invented term combining two words: ito 糸, which means "thread," and meikyū 迷宮, which means "labyrinth." The structure of Ito Meikyū is inspired by classical Japanese literature—The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon and The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. Influenced by the compositional style of the aforementioned texts, Labbé’s Ito Meikyū unfolds as a labyrinth of interwoven relationships, where time and narrative fold back on themselves rather than progressing in a straight line. Moreover, just as a thread suggests continuity, a single unbroken line, the labyrinth by contrast implies misdirection, entanglement, paths that mysteriously double back on themselves. Labbé’s work exists between these two poles: at once linear and recursive, structured and chaotic. His drawn lines accumulate into dense networks, only to fracture and disperse.

Drawing is not just an act of inscription but a record of process, of the artist’s hand in motion. For Labbé, his drawings are not static compositions but traces of movement, restless and unstable. They call attention to the labor of drawing itself, to its capacity for movement and resistance to fixity. In this sense, drawing can be the most material of marks and yet the most immaterial of acts. More than merely depicting “thread labyrinths”, the comprehensive body of work in Labbé’s Wandering Threads enact them, pulling the viewer into shifting fields of form and meaning. They operate as a kind of visual and textual assemblage, a collection of impressions that resist any stable hierarchy, ultimately underscoring how life’s ‘wandering threads’ are always caught between an assertion of form and its potential dissolution. 

PROGRAMMING

In Conversation: Boris Labbé x Wade Wallerstein

Wednesday, April 2nd from 5-7pm
re.riddle gallery
1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco

Presented in partnership with Villa Albertine, artist Boris Labbé speaks with Gray Area Associate Curator Wade Wallerstein about his artistic practice, the notion of “threaded labyrinths”, and the relationship between line, text, textiles in virtual and augmented realities.

Wade Wallerstein is an anthropologist and curator from the San Francisco Bay Area. Currently, he serves as Associate Curator at Gray Area, a San Francisco non-profit whose mission is to cultivate, sustain, and apply anti-disciplinary collaboration--integrating art, technology, science, and the humanities--towards a more equitable and regenerative future. In general, his work focuses on the phenomenological impact of simulation-based art practices. Additionally, Wallerstein is the Founder of Silicon Valet, Co-director of TRANSFER Gallery, and Content Strategist for HTC VIVE Arts. His curatorial work has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Dazed, Artforum, & more.

Villa Albertine, the French Institute for Culture and Education, is a division of the French Embassy in the United States. Since 2021, on the cultural front, they provide customized exploratory residencies across the US for global creators and thinkers. With offices in ten cities across the country, Villa Albertine also offers incubators and grants for French and American culture professionals; public events across creative disciplines; and a print magazine and podcast. Villa Albertine’s credo is that artists can contribute key insights to address society’s pressing questions, and that collaborating across borders deepens those insights.

ARTWORKS

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