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In his day job, Noah Loesberg is a woodworker, constructing cabinetry for homes and art institutions, and has become acquainted with what he calls “the methods of the built environment.”

“An architect might draw a cube but the builder has to decide how to build that cube using standard materials and standard ways of using materials. It’s the juncture of the overall design of architecture, interpreted through the lens of these standards,” Loesberg says. “It’s not the overt design of a building but the ways the building had to be built based on standards.”

Loesberg, whose work is on the walls at Real Art Ways in Hartford, saw a semblance of the built environment one day when he saw a stack of Jersey barriers beside a road.

“The stack caught my eye. … If you assign the highway guys to put all these barriers somewhere they stack them as tall and safely and as efficiently as they can,” he said. “It’s elegant efficiency, it’s simplicity, not part of design of highway barrier.”

Loesberg’s artworks are drawings, with oil stick and wax, and sculptural constructions of stacks of Jersey barriers. The sculptures hew to the simplicity of the roadside stack, but Loesberg’s drawings show the Jersey barriers willy-nilly, in a variety of much more inefficient configurations.

He cited as an inspiration for his work the art of Rachel Whiteread, the British sculptor who creates casts of everyday objects, such as furniture and architectural elements, to capture the essence of the objects.

His construction work helps fuel his projects, he says.

“My jobs bring me to those places where there is always a new source of material to look at.”

NOAH LOESBERG: NIGHT WORK is at Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St. in Hartford, starting July 19, 2018 with a reception at 6 p.m., until Sept. 9. realartways.org.