PETER DELLERT

New Paradigm Continuum

jUNE 7 - AUGUST 26 2024

The New Paradigm Tool Company is the brainchild of Peter Dellert, who for several decades was a furniture maker and cabinetmaker, and now has turned most of his time and energy into making sculpture.  Dellert works out of an old truck garage in the center of Holyoke, Massachusetts.  Dellert is the sole employee at New Paradigm which produces sculptures out of old reclaimed farm and construction tools. These works utilize legacy tools for manual labor which Dellert has salvaged and collected.  These tools are refitted with new, surprising, and elaborate wood handles, often laboriously laminated and bent into curves; additional modifications to the tools are also employed. These changes render the tools seemingly non-functional, absurd and surrealistic. 

The work focuses on an examination of hand tools.  The work seeks to address the place of the worker, especially the hand worker and manual laborer in contemporary Western culture.  The relation of labor and capital is embodied in the technology of tools. Tools are the means of production in society, and such means of production create our social relationships.  These modified tools ask what kind of social relations would emerge from such absurd means of production? This absurdity is a critique on the un-reflected deployment of technology without the consideration of the resulting change in social relations.   What at first might appear as a nostalgic look at a past era is in fact a bold statement on the future of labor in the age of digital transformation born of artificial intelligence and increasing automation of manual work in our future.  


And as individuals, we need to ask ourselves about the relationship between the body, our body and the mind, our mind. Hand tools help us to access and develop this relationship in ways that the digital cannot. As humans we were gifted with hands with opposable thumb and fingers as only a few other mammals are.  And this trait has allowed us to develop in ways early humans never dreamed of.  We should not let this gift go to waste by concentrating only on our minds.

Peter Dellert: New Paradigm Continuum