Once a caterpillar has gorged itself with nutrients, it must find a suitable resting place. Clinging tightly to a branch, its skin buckles and splits like a torn seam. Its ruptured flesh hardens, forming into a protective shell. But if you were to open up a chrysalis (pupa) mid-transformation, you would not find a caterpillar or a butterfly writhing toward its next form but a soupy, amorphous substance. Before a butterfly can form, the caterpillar releases enzymes that digest its tissues, liquefying it from the inside out, expediting the cellular division necessary to create a set of wings, antennae, legs, eyes, and reproductive organs.

Charlotte vander Borght’s recent work undergoes a similarly grotesque transformation, merging the industrial and the organic. Her exhibition opens with a netted, pond-scum-colored sculpture from her ongoing series Someone, No One, Anyone started in 2019. Often inverted, mounted on walls, and nestled into architecture, works from the series seem to linger in limbo, silently awaiting metamorphosis. Initially inspired by New York subway seats, this series quickly became vehicles for abstraction, remodeling the prototype into mutable, tonal-shaped paintings. Using resin, fiberglass, urethane, and pigment, vander Borght continuously reshapes them into unrecognizable painterly variants.

Themes of manufacturing and industry, latent in the first metro seats, arrive with full force in vander Borght’s photography. Large-format, high-resolution images of industrial spaces and commercial infrastructure create the illusion of the gallery space extending outward––a vacant truck bed littered with remnants, an empty elevator where a cleaning woman pauses as if caught mid-duty. These are transient spaces built for transporting goods and individuals. Whether elevators, trucks, subways, or chrysalises, the world of Charlotte vander Borght is one of perpetual transformation.

Vertical forms like Metamorphosis (D) and Metamorphosis (G) appear both alluring and hostile. Their surfaces echo the painterly application of her previous sculpture, but their shapes are more nebulous, even anthropomorphic. In Metamorphosis (D), a slender mahogany figure hovers before a blank wall, while Metamorphosis (G) looms, foreboding like a mummy sealed in a smooth sarcophagus. Nearby, Metamorphosis (C) suggests a more deviant transformation––part silvery chrysalis, part cracked open drainpipe, seemingly abandoned mid-metamorphosis. Mounted against a massive photographic wallpaper of an enlarged apple tree, Metamorphosis (D) appears dwarfed, suspended like an ornament before the oversized fruit-bearing branches. The scene recalls a sun-faded billboard––an artificial nature looming behind a shadowy, shifting form.

Vander Borght’s latest sculptures push further into the anthropomorphic and biomorphic, reaching their most nightmarish forms yet. A monstrous purple-and-black figure, reminiscent of a corpse flower, erupts from the wall. The actual plant, known for its brief bloom and acrid stench, radiates heat—her version seems to burst through tar. Mounted at shoulder height and inverted, its central spear thrusts outward with malice. Its shiny belly appears wet as if covered by gasoline. It bulges like a snake digesting its prey.
Elsewhere, flora takes on another haunting presence. In one of the final rooms, a wall-mounted sculpture imitates a giant morning glory, its velvety petals peeling away from a deep black void. It pushes through the white plaster like a rogue mushroom, forcing itself through a crack in the sidewalk. Nearby, photo collages of the flower produce nauseating, psychedelic bouquets—dense with multicolored blossoms, singing the plant’s hallucinogenic properties.

––Lola Kramer