Howard Hersh is an artist who has used structural imagery as a metaphor for identifying ourselves in space and time. His paintings blur distinctions between illusion and object, painting and substrate. While his style continues to evolve, he has been consitently working with encaustic on wood for seveal decades. The sawhorses in his studio are used to support his wooden panels as he applies wax to them. As wax drips off the sides, it accumulates. After nearly two decades of accumulation, the sawhorses began to take on a presece of their own, with an undeniable anthropomorphic quality. The artist describes them as “not so much a work of art, more like a work-station.” But after prying them loose from his studo floor, attaching them to plywood bases, and installing them at the gallery, they have been de- and re-contextualized. They are part functional tool, part accidental sculpture, and part pet. Howard Hersh is a third generation artist who has exhibited his work widely around the country. With 60 solo shows and 200 hundred group exhibits, Hersh’s work is also in prominent public spaces in the United States, Japan, China, Indonesia, and Africa. He has exibited many times at Addington Gallery in Chicago, Butters Gallery in Portland, and Nüart Gallery in Nashville, among many others.