A double impulse foot sealer, a tinting squeegee, a soldering paddle—these are among the hand tools you’ll encounter at THWACK, an exhibition installed in a gargantuan former fulfillment center at the Brooklyn Army Terminal that has sat empty for the past twenty years. The show heralds the skill and labor of the 3,500 craftspeople who work at BAT, making things “as diverse as the brain can imagine,” according to the introductory wall text.

The show’s ingenuity (created by artist and curator Alex Kalman) is to spotlight, not on the manufactured objects themselves, but the tools used to make them, captured in photographs blown up to fill canvases as big as king-sized bedsheets hanging throughout the 36,000 square-foot space. A viscosity calculator makes sure Japanese salad dressing is consistent; a jig shapes handmade guitars; a batter hopper molds ice cream cones. The flinty soldering paddle, a tool used to spread molten metal in the making of rocket ships, resembles a handmade prison shiv. At this scale, the tools take on mythic proportions. They are instruments of the gods, Hephaestus at this smithy.

It’s brain-tickling that MMuseumm, whose exhibitions are typically housed in a former elevator shaft in Tribeca, has commandeered a space the acreage of a Berghain stand-in from John Wick—all while maintaining its commitment to exploring everyday objects. For those of us who spend our days staring at Google docs and spreadsheets, there’s an element of indoor cat envy for the outdoor cat world of craftspeople. In that regard, the enlarged (engorged?) images of the tools of their craft are damn near pornographic, teasing us with the possibility of a more sensory  and tactile existence. It’s enough to make you want to thwack off. —Lisa Hsiao Chen