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My artistic practice, encompassing sculpture, collage, and drawing, explores the dynamic tension between balance and imbalance, stillness and movement. By working with discarded materials such as old blue jeans, button-up shirts, neckties, and furniture, alongside traditional elements like paper, wire, plaster, paint, and graphite, I engage in a process of deconstruction and reconstruction.

I slice, rip, saw, and sever these materials into fragments, then glue, tape, screw, and sew them back together. This repetitive reassembly of fragments creates pieces that are both whole and in a state of becoming. My work reimagines these materials, imbuing them with new meaning while honoring their past lives.

My work is deeply influenced by Heraclitus’s philosophy that “the only constant is change.” This concept of ongoing transformation—a flowing river that cannot be stepped into twice—underpins my creative process. Objects with past lives and histories are reimagined and given new roles, symbolizing the shifting nature of identity and value. Just as Heraclitus describes fire as an eternal transformative force, I use humble, overlooked items to reflect the flux and impermanence of existence.

Frequent movement and change are central to my life and work. Growing up across various cities and schools, with shifting homes and jobs, I’ve developed a practice that reflects adaptability and improvisation. Without a permanent studio, I carry my materials and projects with me, working in a range of environments. This nomadic, flexible approach mirrors the improvisational, layered nature of my work, where each piece reflects an ongoing journey shaped by its environment.

Ultimately, my work is a meditation on the overlooked, the transient, and the incomplete. By transforming familiar materials into layered, abstract forms, I hope to inspire new perspectives on memory, identity, and collective history. Each piece embodies the constant flux of life and argues that within change lies endless potential for transformation and meaning.

Below is the entirety of Jason Foumberg's essay for my solo exhibition at the Chicago Artists Coalition in 2018.

Brent Fogt’s Chance Statues
By Jason Foumberg

The thing about sculpture is that only one person can touch it. Only one set of hands gets to be physical; only those hands can tell you what to see. This is the seductive myth of gallery sculpture in a culture of individualism, in contrast to the invisible hands that attend the found-material sculptures of Brent Fogt for his exhibition “Do Something Else” in which composite objects pose like independent structures, collected by Fogt from the city’s stream of stray things. Simultaneously authorless and burnished by a thousand limbs, Fogt’s pieces are as smooth as the shared language that sculpts the hollows of your hot mouth.

I believe that Fogt flirts with the idea that artists have a magic touch. He tests this method with various materials and transformations: concrete, crotchet, gravity, paint, cut book pages and dust. He knows that geometries can be dismantled into smaller solids and that time is infinite but we are rusted by our own era. We are animated bones, not metaphors. Fogt is engaged in a creative ritual to manipulate his materials into alignment. Turtles and birds do this with the magnets in their heads. Fogt’s sculptures are not cast bronze and they’re not going to commemorate a hero or an official history. They will do the opposite of that: commemorate sagging time.

Does sagging time make you anxious? Or is it kind of funny? Neither precious nor random, Fogt’s series of abstract sculptures are interchangeable, like the thousand infants borne of an archetype, genetic variations within limits. In other words, the mind can only catch what the universe excretes.

Fogt’s chance statues step out of the Existentialism swamp. They’re a chair you can’t quite sit in or a ladder you can’t quite climb, a mortality that fits like the wrong size of pants. There’s a missing body or too many of them. The material that is missing may be you. How do you describe the substance that’s between what we desire and what we get? How do you sculpt that?

Jason Foumberg is an art critic who contributes reviews, artist profiles, and arts features to Chicago Magazine, The Art Newspaper, Artfourm.com, and Photograph. He is also curator of digital art at the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation.