Two Chairs

source: dailyserving

Darren Foote’s Two Chairs is a life apart from the first two works. His chairs are a mirrored pair that have dissolved, leaving no question of their handmade qualities. Their shape, a melting dissipation made in oak, doesn’t reveal any secrets or hold any graphic pattern that we need to unlock. Instead, their usefulness is squandered and we are left with a scarcity of possibilities. Either these chairs are being eaten by something in their interior or reflect shoddy workmanship by the producer. Erase a bit here, casually destroy a section of wood till it’s barely there– having a physical manifestation of what you can easily do in photoshop is unnerving. Are they a pendant pair, a portrait of disconnection? Their emotion, a punch you in the stomach feeling of decay, outweighs any concept that may be driving their creation.
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source: artsynet

Drawing from philosophy, science, art history, and nature, Darren Blackstone Foote makes mixed-media sculptures, and takes sculptural photographs, through which he explores the age-old questions about man’s place in the world and relationship to nature. As he describes: “I’m interested in finding points of re-connection not only to nature, but the natural mechanisms of life and death. I’m specifically interested in how we, as thinking, powerful agents contend with the world we’ve created.” Blackstone Foote works primarily with natural and elemental materials, including cowhide, glass, plaster, and, most importantly, wood, which is central to his work. Shaped and raw, his wooden logs, branches, planks, and forms evoke living forests and eforestation, creation and destruction, persistence and decay. Such opposing forces hang in fraught, fragile balance in all of Blackstone Foote’s work, as they do in life.