The Poetics of Specific Labor:

Portraits and Poems

Exhibition will on display during regular gallery hours Wednesday - Saturday 12:00 pm - 5:00 pm. Opening receptions is June 12, 2026 5:00 pm - 9:00 pm.

This project is built from voices speaking about labor. From people describing what they do, again and again, over time. Precise tasks. Repeated gestures. Decisions learned through years of practice rather than explanation. For Antonio Gramsci, self-awareness is formed through work: through repetition, discipline, and the sustained engagement of mind and body with material tasks. Labor is not simply what is done, but a process through which consciousness takes shape. Fascination emerges in the smallest adjustment: the exact pressure, the correct angle, the moment one learns when to stop. Specificity is not an aesthetic choice added at the end; it is a form of knowledge produced through labor. In jewelry, as in many forms of making, nothing begins from zero. We work with materials already shaped by other hands. A network of labors sustains our practice: preparing metal, rolling and bending it, repairing tools, sustaining precision. Our work rests—knowingly or not—on this accumulated labor. Through a series of portraits by Detroit-based Eric Perry and Italian photojournalist Erica Canepa, this project listens to what happens when someone speaks about their specific labor : what occupies the mind, what sharpens over time, what remains.