Photo By Selena Reder

Kelly (left) and Kyle Phelps stand at "The Worker's Altar," part of their Blue Collar exhibition at the Weston Art Gallery.

Tiger Woods swinging a nine-iron on the green. This is the image that artists Kelly and Kyle Phelps say their father would like them to create. But the brothers have chosen instead to portray low-income factory workers from small-town America.

You won't find the athlete in Orlando, Fla., with a seven-figure income anywhere in their work.

"Tiger Woods is great but he's not my people, the working class people in my neighborhood," says Kyle Phelps.

The identical twin brothers grew up in New Castle, Ind. Three generations of their family have worked at the local automotive plant. It is their father, who spent more than 40 years in the plant, who informs much of their work.

Blue Collar is an exhibition of relief sculpture on display at the Alice K. Weston Gallery. The clay figures stand inside handmade frames, which mirror the dismal interiors of U.S. factories. The scale of the figures and hand-painted quality of the clay give the work the character of an oil painting.

Unlike an oil painting, Kelly and Kyle are not striving to make "high art." They're looking for something more immediate and accessible to their audience.

"We could have used high art materials like bronze and oil paints and marble but what's wrong with just regular clay and scrap metal?" Kelly asks.

They would rather work in the materials of the everyday man. To this end the brothers have collected from plants around the country. Most notably, a pair of their father's work boots hang below one sculpture. The corrugated metal that frames many of the pieces comes from various plants that have shut down. Sand paper and soot are the archives of a people.

Some of the artifacts tell the story of factories that laid their employees off and outsourced jobs to Mexico. Their work examines the beauty and decay of factory life. The clay figures stand in metal shavings swept from the floor of a GM plant. The shoulders of Miss America are glossed smooth. The grease on the female worker once lubricated the gears of an actual factory machine.

In "Time Clock" a man waits with a face blackened from real factory soot. The time clock is the best place to be at the end of the day but the worst place to be at the start of the day.

Then there are pieces like "Communion," which explore the blue-collar worker off the clock. An abject male figure kneels with his head upturned as if to receive Communion. In this case the blood of Christ might be the beer bottle in his hand.

The work is not autobiographical but the brothers' fingerprints are embedded in the clay. After undergraduate school at Ball State they joined their family in the factory. Standing daily in 4-by-4-foot work cells, the brothers sketched the workers. These became the preliminary drawings for their sculptures.

One sculpture echoes the strange dichotomy of working in the plant with a college education. A young worker rests his head to his blackened fist, sitting in his 4-foot cell. The posturing recalls Auguste Rodin's "The Thinker."

The work is highly narrative and archival but the figures are not meant to pinpoint any one person, time or place. The faces hold the expression of everyman.

In "The Worker's Altar" a man and a woman stand on the outer ends of a triptych. Two cupped hands comprise the center frame. The work echoes such religious art as Northern Renaissance painter Hans Memling's triptych of Adam and Eve. The hands that appear to descend from heaven are curious. They are distinctly feminine and spilling forth from the palms are gears. The hands of God appear to be giving Adam and Eve the tools to go work in the factory.

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BLUE COLLAR is on view at the Weston Art Gallery through Nov. 5.