Worker, clean room, Toshiba, Kawasaki City, Japan Possibly 1989 - 2006

Lewis Baltz captured this image, "Worker, clean room, Toshiba, Kawasaki City, Japan," using photography. The pastel colour palette exudes order. It feels like a tightly controlled environment. I wonder, what was Baltz thinking, being in a factory like this, a site of labor and production? The worker is cloaked in the uniform that is a signifier of clean production, and leans on the desk in a posture of perhaps…boredom? The ceiling has the kind of grid that is a bit like an Agnes Martin painting, and it runs on endlessly. Repetition is the main motif here. The man is anonymous. It is a different subject, a different medium, but the same questions apply: How do we communicate through process? How does an artist translate their way of experiencing the world to a two-dimensional surface? Artists always build on what others have done, riffing off one another's ideas across time. Every mark we make is a response to a question.