Corine Borgnet addresses issues of personal identity within the context of a universal struggle for self-clarification and self-actualization. The artist uses a mélange of references from popular children’s novels such as Little Red Riding Hood and The Wizard of Oz, to exploit subtexts of sexual and existential confusion analogous to the experiences of adolescent girls. As in earlier work, Shift has a psychodynamic dimension that is expressed visually, rather than theoretically. Through an interaction of drawing, painting, and sculptural works, Borgnet creates literary allusions that elicit personal and universal associations about fear, struggle, and transformation. As becomes evident in Shift, Borgnet is quite deft at illuminating the juncture where one’s sense of self-struggles to find and maintain itself.

Corine Borgnet was born in France and has been living in New York City for the past decade. She began working in figurative sculpture but after a residency at Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic moved towards constructing installations that use diverse elements to produce a complex, scattered, almost schizophrenic environment. She has had a one-person show at the Columbia University’s Maison Francaise, the United Nations, and her work was included in-group exhibitions at Artists’ Space in New York and the ICA in London.