An ever-present demand which satisfies the necessities of food, clothing, shelter. People have lived by it, and often died for it. But at the core of any work, there are individuals, real human beings.
Machines merely function.
And a good portion of this exhibition includes images of flesh and blood working people. They are more than just what they do. Andre Pierre - Electrician is a collaboration by sculptor Margaret Lanterman and painter Nancy Plotkin, and combines an oil portrait of the electrician with a cast of his hands. What we want to show in these portraits is the dignity of the individual worker, the expressiveness and beauty of their hands and the sense that hands are the instruments of the mind. That Lanterman's sculpted hands are three-dimensional, tactile, and that Plotkin's painting renders the personality of their possessor as illusion on flat surface, together generates a conceptual parallel to the material nature of hands and the immateriality of the mind that guides them.