As artist Rick Doehring took walks around town while taking a break from sequestering in place during the pandemic, he noticed a curious phenomenon involving pairs of chairs. His photos and essay follow.
Photo: Rick Doehring
Walking around Santa Barbara during this pandemic I noticed something unusual happening in our city: two chairs began popping up outside people’s homes.
Photo: Rick Doehring
It seemed odd to me that there was nearly always two, not just one, or three or more. Then it struck me that many of us were sheltering in place with one other person.
Photo: Rick Doehring
To me the chairs became a metaphor for our current style of living. The pairs of chairs I saw were awaiting occupants who had become so sick of being stuck inside that they needed an outdoor place of refuge.
Photo: Rick Doehring
Some of these chairs had been placed in planned areas, such as patios, and they had been obviously waiting for occupants to come outside for years.
Photo: Rick Doehring
Many chairs had never been used, and some never would be, their fate was to be left forever unoccupied and forgotten.
Photo: Rick Doehring
But many pairs of chairs had been recently jammed into just about any space where they would fit. Though I photographed all types, it was these new chairs which inspired this essay.
Photo: Rick Doehring
So many pairs of chairs appeared recently that it suggested that this had become, like the wearing of masks – one more odd activity that most of us had previously rarely done but had begun to commonly do as a result of the pandemic.
Photo: Rick Doehring
And so we began to share this activity, at a distance but simultaneously, as if everyone in the city had collectively decided to join in the simple but profoundly reassuring act of spending time just sitting next to each other.
Photo: Rick Doehring
Most of us need to get out of our house so desperately that it doesn’t matter that our refuge is just a few feet from our front door.
Photo: Rick Doehring
In fact, it feels unsafe to go much further than that, and so we escape from our urban caves only to sit beside them and watch the world that we used to join with reckless and random abandon, abandon us and randomly pass us by.
Photo: Rick Doehring
The two chairs are a sign, a symbol, of a compromise that we have all made – that we are very anxious to get back to actively living in the outside world but, for now, we will sit together, and watch, as this pandemic arrives, and spreads, and surges, and, ultimately, ends.
Photo: Rick Doehring
Once it does, we may push our chairs aside and leave them unoccupied and forgotten, but it might do us well to remember the moments we spent sitting in them, surviving these times together.
Photo: Rick Doehring
