In a dark gallery, looking into a bright room with snow-covered floors and a square hole cut from its center — this is how a viewer experiences A Cold Hole, an installation by artist Taryn Simon. But it’s not a static encounter: Watching from the gallery, you’ll routinely see someone enter the bright room, climb into the hole, and plunge into icy water beneath it. Simon sought to probe questions about public praise and personal desire. But when singer-songwriter Dana Foote saw the piece at an art museum in Western Massachusetts, the dark pit struck her as a powerful metaphor for a period of depression or stagnancy — a “psychological winter,” she’s called it.
Foote was in one such winter while writing Swallow the Knife, her latest record as Sir Chloe.