Gail Peter Borden

Gail Peter Borden was in residence at Chinati during the summer of 2004, concluding his time in Marfa with an exhibition entitled Spaceframes. Borden’s work integrates painting, sculpture, and architectural design through elaborate and precise installations whose parts stand alone but also support and enhance each other. He uses a wide range of media including digital technology, oil and acrylic paint, and a variety of building materials. In Spaceframes, eight small architectural models, each emphasizing a different domestic function, stood on 5-foot tall pedestals dispersed throughout the Locker Plant’s front gallery. The gallery’s walls were hung with large bright abstract paintings, each one serving as a backdrop for a different model. Magnifying peepholes on the architectural models were trained on specific points on the paintings, drawing portions of the painted image into the architectural models and fusing together the two- and three-dimensional elements of the installation. Spaceframes was built from architectural fragments—the paintings were made on doors, the models’ pedestals were made of 2 x 4’s, and the peepholes that united the paintings and architectural models were the hardware used in a home’s front door. Each model was accompanied by a small notebook documenting its evolution. Borden also showed architectural drawings and small abstract paintings whose measurements were determined by different dimensions of the spaces in the Locker Plant.

Borden lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is an artist as well as a practicing architect at Borden Partnership. He is also a professor at the North Carolina State University School of Architecture. Before moving to North Carolina, Borden worked at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Paris and at Jay Baker Architects in Houston. He has held teaching positions at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. and at Harvard University, from which he graduated with a master’s degree in architecture. Borden’s work has been included in exhibitions throughout the United States and at the Architekturforum Oberosterreich in Linz, Austria. In May of 2004, Borden was awarded the Architecture League of New York’s Young Architect’s prize, which was accompanied by an exhibition, if…….then, at the Architecture League, and a corresponding publication, Young Architects 6 (Princeton Architectural Press). Borden’s work has also been shown at the North Carolina State University College of Design Gallery, Raleigh, North Carolina; Duke Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina; and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, among others. In winter of 2003 he participated in the 37th annual Works on Paper exhibition at the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina.