Andrea Davide’s large kinetic sculpture, Time Elemental offers its viewers a beautiful false result: more time. Standing over 6’ high, the work itself is crafted like a fine-tuned instrument with the highest precision tooling, as it promises to provide us with accurate results. But after close inspection and hands on trial, the object reveals no measure, leaving the viewer with no more information than before. Then, as one reflects for a second, it goes on to offer the viewer more information than even the finest Swiss timepiece.

Directly or indirectly, we spend our waking hours trying to control time. Perhaps the biggest bane of human existence is the futility of trying to find some process or invention to manipulate the passage of time. Our concept of time is just that – an invention. It is a necessity, but an inaccurate invention nonetheless. Throughout history, humankind has constructed various ways to quantify time and has invented many instruments of measure to help with this venture: from the most simple and symmetrical sundial, the painted portrait, the Polaroid camera, to the most modern complex watches that incorporate the latest technological advances to know more about your daily routine than you do. Regardless, all of these devices are inaccurate and misleading, because our perception of time is based on a linear path. One might set his or her clock ten minutes ahead to try to avoid being late to work for the third day in a row. A mother might lie awake for hours in bed every evening, wishing she had made her son stay home that night three years ago. A petulant teenager smolders over the years she’ll have to wait until she can move out of the house.

TimeElemental contains one of Davide’s central components, her kinetic RoundTimer, which has now been embedded into a black granite vessel. The RoundTimer created for this work is 8” in diameter, and fully kinetic. It contains two layers of gears that overlap and interconnect with one another, all of which the artist has staked into and between round sheets of glass.

Every aspect of this section of the sculpture is able to be hand manipulated and remains unique.  Each sheet of glass is hand cut and polished. Each antique gear, removed from cuckoo clocks has been painstakingly separated from it’s shaft and hub, then polished, and finally with new gear hubs and shafts that Davide has made by hand, each gear is staked into it’s new glass foundation, allowing the viewer to view and become part of the interconnections and action. Davide designs and engineers her own components and hardware which she makes in her machine shop that allow the RoundTimer to rotate as a unit inside the stone, while the viewer is able to turn the gears and become part of their movement.

The truth is, the only tangible time is the now, and even it is informed by the past and the future. In our world of immediate digital information, TimeElemental entices its viewers to stop, inspect, and contemplate this more fluid and dimensional quantif