Exhibition Review: Hand to Mouth

By Casper Kittle

Hand to Mouth, the current group exhibition at Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee, deals with labor- manual labor, “woman’s work”, the labor of childbirth, and the labor of sex work are included. Seven artists, brought together in the exhibition by show curator TK Smith, considered the nature of work through performance, video work, mixed-media approaches, and photography. Hand to Mouth relies on this sense of immersion, displaying, in plain view for the gallery-goer, labor that is often left unseen. After the exhibit, I felt uncomfortable and unready to confront the reality of my work- to write something concise and universal and takeaway-able about the way I experienced the show. 

On entry: Hand to Mouth is separated into three distinctive sections. Walking in, some exhibit walls are a tractor-green. Audio plays in different videos throughout the gallery, competing for attention. One of those sources is at the front entry- FIELD HOLLA, a short film created by Todd Anthony Johnson in 2016 plays on a loop, projected on a large swath of wall. It is loud. A makeshift bench- a piece of plywood laid across two large paint buckets- invites you to rest uncomfortably for a minute. I felt antsy. In the video, Johnson screams in an open field, his voice visceral and raw and pained. My friend sat with me quietly as I watched it through, and he commented on the sincerity of the labor pains. Commiserating and conspiratorial, he leaned over to me and quietly identified with the work. “Haven’t we all been there?”

Past the gallery welcome of Johnson’s work, the exhibit attendee progresses through the exhibition. Centrally, in the middle third of the exhibition space, is a carefully placed obstacle- an installation by Paul Stephen Benjamin titled Ceiling. This rectangular field of broken glass, dangerous and shimmering and bright from the large windows it falls in line with, takes up most of the center room. I treaded lightly around the broken glass Ceiling, wary of glass dust. On the other side were a couple of mixed-media works by Krista Clark.

A wall running horizontally to Clark’s work brought the viewer to the back third of the exhibition. Two videos- Lydia and Matthew and Cherrie and Matthew (2022 Edit)- by Cherrie Yu lined the wall. Yu, a performance artist, paid attention to moments of repetition in banal, underpaid laborers, then performed these repetitive moments as dance. Past this was Kaitlynn Redell’s series on motherhood. As Redell cloaks herself as an object that supports her child, the central focus in photographs in a series titled not her(e) photograph series, Redell identifies motherhood as such a selfless act that the mother herself becomes invisible. An intimate series of photographs conveying the transactionality of sex work by Derrick Woods Morrow and one more large video installation on womanhood by Danielle Deadwyler reside in the back section.

From the cries of a tormented body in FIELD HOLLA that draw a comparison between the slave labor of the old South and the modern suffering of manual labor, where manual laborers are over twice as likely to suffer injury (1) than those of us that work in white-collar roles. After a stint of time spent unemployed, being surrounded by the challenging labor that undergirds society left me thinking about what it means to be established, productive, and providing.

The exhibition’s statement mentions the repetition of manual labor- the movement of it. “The repetitive actions of manual laborers—pushing, pulling, lifting— are rarely considered expressive, if considered at all.” 

The true work of Hand to Mouth is in the attention and artfulness it assigns to traditionally undervalued labor. Our labor system is designed to reduce itself to a static hum in the background of our lives. I have been thinking about labor, the U.S. class system, the global class system, and distribution. The exhibit drew attention to the systemic inequalities underscored by the invisibility of certain types of labor. I left feeling a little uncomfortable, but I felt uncomfortable in a way I think I was meant to be.

Hand to Mouth will be on view until June 22.

Stove Works gallery hours are:
Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 6:30 PM | Closed Sunday – Tuesday 

Visit https://www.stoveworks.org/calendar for a timeline of upcoming events.

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1. Baidwan, N.K., Gerberich, S.G., Kim, H. et al. A longitudinal study of work-related injuries: comparisons of health and work-related consequences between injured and uninjured aging United States adults. Inj. Epidemiol. 5, 35 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40621-018-0166-7