Blue Thin Horizon: Ben Borden
NOON Projects is honored to present Blue Thin Horizon, a special one-week installation by Ben Borden, on view January 22–25, 2026. Originally presented in Helsinki, this limited engagement offers an opportunity to experience the works in Los Angeles, paired with an evening of live music on January 24 in collaboration with Departure from Music Venue(s) (DMV), the experimental music series organized by artist and musician Dakota Higgins.
Blue Thin Horizon presents a series of new chemical reaction paintings and candlelit works. Borden’s practice employs a hybrid of chemical and organic processes to create images that resist stasis. These are not fixed pictures but living surfaces, shifting imperceptibly over time. Each work functions as an “anti-captured” portrait of nature, self-generating and in flux, where traces of earlier states remain embedded within the surface.
The paintings emerge through a negotiation between control and surrender. Borden works with chemicals originally developed to create the world’s first light-fast pigment, later adapted to test the integrity of steel welds, combining them with algae bioplastic and steel. Within this volatile material system, the artist sets the conditions for an event, allowing matter, process, and time to co-author the image. The resulting abstractions evoke geologic formations, microscopic fields, or psychic landscapes. While their self-generating qualities may recall artificial intelligence, the works feel animated by something irreducibly alive, carrying both material presence and spiritual charge.
On Saturday, January 24, Blue Thin Horizon will be accompanied by Departure from Music Venue(s) at NOON Projects, a one-night musical program presented by DMV. The evening runs from 7–11 PM and features three musical performances alongside a participatory community drone session. To open the program, attendees are invited to bring an instrument or sound-making object to contribute to a collective drone lasting approximately 10–15 minutes, gradually giving way to the first act. Musical performances will continue through the evening until 11:00 PM. Refreshments will be served.
Ben Borden is an artist and educator who lives in Los Angeles and works in the City of Commerce, California. Trained in industrial design, Borden's practice engages with materials and processes in ways that resist control and utility in favor of the incidental and by-product. He utilizes processes adapted from the fields of industrial manufacturing, material science, and biotechnology to explore systems reflective of impermanence and faith.
DMV was founded by artist and musician Dakota Higgins. Since its inception in 2021, the Departure from Music Venue(s) has been dedicated to presenting music from LA's expansive DIY/Experimental music scene, including such acts as Muscle Beach, Lxs Cochinxs, Los Angeles Woodwind Skill Share, Black NASA, Jacob Wolff, Qur'an Shaheed, You, Me, and the Whales, Psychobuildings, and Steve Kado. Originally based out of an autobody shop in Commerce, CA, the DMV has organized shows in garages, living rooms, and back yards throughout Los Angeles.