Brigette Borders

BA, Wellesley College; M.Arch, Columbia University; MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Teaching Experience: Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, 2009-2018. Group Exhibitions: New Museum, New York; MoMA, New York; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York.

Brigette’s work visualizes invisible systems of logic with imagined physical counterparts. In her sculptures, she seeks to illuminate ways that today’s urban dwellers are over-stimulated, over-connected, and over-stressed. By producing and occupying prosthetic mechanisms, and training her body to accept reduced stimuli via blunt force, she critiques the practice of solving society’s technological problems with like solutions. Her paintings offer an additional layer of cultural dissection, wherein she paints with computer numerical controlled machines to visualize hidden three-dimensional systems that busy our world, such as over-stimulated brain waves, or the unnatural sounds of meditative breathing.

Her use of wax as sculptural paint is belied by traditional methods of encaustic, as she subverts the eye using crisp forms within seemingly unstructured constraints. Her work is inspired by the often ruled but at times chaotic organization of natural and urban landscapes. Her need for regularity drives an obsessive use of platonic forms, which will only be satisfied when every potential line and all possible circles have finally been drawn.