This nocturnal urban scene features a dimly lit gas station at night, with a lone car parked in the foreground. The muted colors, including shades of green and yellow, create a moody, atmospheric ambiance. The composition emphasizes the stark contrasts between light and shadow, reflecting the artist's mastery of chiaroscuro techniques. The subject matter suggests a sense of solitude and isolation, perhaps alluding to the transient nature of modern life. This work exemplifies the artist's distinctive style, which blends realism and a cinematic sensibility to capture the poetic essence of everyday urban landscapes. ...
Charlotte Vander Borght’s work—whether sculptural or photographic—centers on the material language of industry and architecture. She investigates how design functions not just aesthetically or practically, but ideologically, embedding cultural and political values into the spaces we inhabit and the objects that surround us. By reconfiguring elements drawn from urban infrastructure, particularly public seating and transit-related forms, Vander Borght blurs the line between function and fiction. She alters standardized components through processes of cutting, sanding, and recombining—transforming them into hybrid structures that hover between anthropomorphic and mechanical. These altered forms retain subtle traces of their origins: dents, joints, or ghosted outlines that suggest their previous lives while resisting complete recognition. Her practice invites a slower, more critical way of seeing. In emphasizing the overlooked and the utilitarian, Vander Borght prompts reflection on how bodies move through designed environments and how ideology is coded into material form. Her sculptures challenge conventions of form and utility, creating space for new ways of understanding architecture, infrastructure, and their intimate ties to power. ...
