Artist Statement of Current Work

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Art took shape for me many years ago as a social-activist designing late-night guerrilla installations in San Francisco. Sculpture then caught my attention with the promise of hammering away at stony resistance until it eventually gave way to beauty; and especially the Oxy-acetylene torch for bending metal to my will, into durable forms that gave voice to those who can’t speak for themselves. It was cathartic, but as my activism segued into Equal Justice I began to question sculpture as a suitable medium. And when the nine-foot Supreme Court penis I’d sculpted didn’t sell, and required storage, I began painting.

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My paintings are still loosely based on the social problems most people want to avoid. So instead, I focus on their creative solutions. I’ve delved deep into my subconscious for the answers, so the images are whimsical, painlessly oblique, often surreal, and always in living color.

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Artist Statement of Early Work

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I sculpt to forge a deeper insight into my life, both past and present. Working through the medium at hand I arrive at a conscious understanding of what it is I am seeing, finding myself in the dicey business of serving-up subconscious thoughts to the conscious mind, using the evolving sculpture as a go-between. These provocations are met with saws, mallets, and fire until an accurate form is rendered and diplomacy reestablished between body and mind.

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Bio

 

Chris Darst is an award-winning San Francisco artist. They discovered sculpture many years ago as a diversion from a memoir in progress. The words stopped flowing after wandering into the unspeakable, so they quietly covered the Smith-Corona and picked up a blow torch.

 

While their preferred medium is stone, they continually explore a wide array of media utilizing assemblage, reclaimed wood, found object and fabric.

They use metal and installation to create oversized and evocative sculpture to spark a conversation about the silence that ails humanity. Their work is deeply driven by their own life-experience, the basis of their explorations both into the dark and the illumination with which they return.

 

Chris has been recognized by Allied Artists of America, New York City, for their stone work, and the San Francisco Equal Justice Society for their social statement through art. They were nominated for the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship Program, and their recent foray into painting has earned several Juror's Awards of Merit. They continue to refine their craft and their vision in their pursuit of equal justice.

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