Image © Oakes Oakes 2013, Ocean Texture 5, painting on paper

Solo Exhibition

The Oakes Twins: Line of Sight

Curated by Anastasiya Siro

March 6 – March 10, 2013

46 Mercer Street, PH
New York, NY 10013

House of the Nobleman is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by Ryan and Trevor Oakes.

Line of Sight features the Oakes twins’ obsessively handmade sculptures, experimental drawings and large-scale paintings, including selections from their critically acclaimed series Concave Drawings and Synchronized Field Paintings. The Oakes’ artworks reveal an intense focus and meditative approach, as each seemingly disparate body of work has in common the theory that by following consistent local rules complex global structures emerge.

Installation view at the North Dakota Museum of Art

Solo Exhibition

The Oakes Twins

August 7 – September 30, 2012

North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND

Brothers and collaborators, Ryan and Trevor Oakes create detailed drawings which mimic both the details and the shape of human vision. Using a system of their own invention, the Oakes twins employ split focus and a curved easel to render illusionistic space in three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface. Sculptures in cardboard and early matchstick studies further articulate the artists’ conception of light rays as they intersect with the human eye to create images of space and volume.

The Twins drawing method has been described, by no less an authority than Columbia University’s perceptual historian Jonathan Crary, as one of the most original breakthroughs in the rendering of visual space since the Renaissance.

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Symposium

The Science of Art

Tuesday, September 11, 5:00 pm

Location: North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND

The North Dakota Museum of Art is sponsoring a one-day symposium The Science of Art held in conjunction with the Museum’s current exhibition by the Oakes Twins. Humanities star, Lawrence Weschler, will moderate a panel discussion with the Oakes Twins and introduce the keynote speaker, Charles Falco, an ocular scientist.

5 pm — Lawrence Weschler: Science and Art As Parallel and Divergent Ways of Knowing

Weschler is currently the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and former staff writer for The New Yorker. He has authored such books as Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Vermeer in Bosnia, and Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin.

7 pm – The Oakes Twins: Double Vision, A Moderated Exhibition Talk with Lawrence Weschler

Lawrence Weschler will lead a discussion with twin brothers and artists Ryan and Trevor Oakes.

8 pm — Charles Falco: The Science of Optics: The History of Art

Falco, working in collaboration with artist David Hockney, is a pioneer in applying optical science analyses to understand how some Renaissance artists may have used optical devices as aids in their painting. Falco is Professor of Optical Sciences and Chair of Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Arizona. He has published more than 250 scientific manuscripts, co-edited two books and registered seven U.S. patents.

9 pm — Discussion session with Charles Falco, Lawrence Weschler, and Ryan and Trevor Oakes

The Science of Art symposium is supported by David Rognlie and Fern Letnes, the North Dakota Council on the Arts, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. ]]> http://oakesoakes.com/exhibitions/past/04-ndmoa/feed/ 0 http://oakesoakes.com/exhibitions/past/03-uc-berkeley/ http://oakesoakes.com/exhibitions/past/03-uc-berkeley/#comments Mon, 03 Sep 2012 09:45:56 +0000 admin http://oakesoakes.com/?p=1012

Image © Oakes Oakes 2012, concave drawing of the Getty Gardens

Solo Exhibition

New Work by Ryan and Trevor Oakes

September 12 – October 6, 2012
Reception: Wednesday, September 12, 4pm – 7pm

Worth Ryder Art Gallery, UC Berkeley, 116 Kroeber Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720
Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 12 – 5pm

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Lecture

Capturing Visual Consciousness: A Tale of Two Eyes, One Brain, One Hand, and One Pen

Monday, September 17, 7:30 pm

Location: Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley

The shape of one’s own protruding nose, and it’s subtle yet constant presence in one’s visual field, has a lot to do with the way visual art has “shaped up” over the centuries. Not only that, as one looks past their nose their two eyes view the world from the center points of two spheres. Furthermore, the automatic (and age old) cooperation of one’s two eyes, as they integrate their separate images inside the brain to construct three dimensional space, can be utilized in a yet uncharted manner to produce an optically accurate “scan” of one’s visual consciousness, output with a pen onto paper, without any mathematics, man-made lenses, or mirrors. The prehistoric biological technologies humans are born with (the eyes, the hand, and brain) are all that’s needed to record space exactly as humans see it, which is to say, to externalize a tangible cross section of the brain’s cognition of the electromagnetic field that hums before our eyes.

Alarmingly, this radically new approach to capturing visual consciousness has just been uncovered in the 21st century. Given that humans are born with the tools needed, why didn’t this discovery predate western optical studies dating back to before the Renaissance?

The Oakes brothers present an account of how they arrived at a new drawing method based on the principles above. Their talk will illuminate fundamental perceptual truths regarding the spherical nature of human vision, will re-examine the canon of western perspective, and will introduce the most naturalistic mode of drawing visual space to date.

Co-presented by the Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium, UC Berkeley’s Center for New Media (BCNM), UCB Department of Art Practice, Berkeley School of Optometry, and the Zero1 Biennial

Image © Oakes Oakes 2012, concave drawing of the Getty Gardens

Solo Exhibition

New Work by Ryan and Trevor Oakes

Worth Ryder Art Gallery
UC Berkeley, 116 Kroeber Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720

September 12 – October 6, 2012
Reception: Wednesday, September 12, 4 – 7pm
Open Tuesday through Saturday, 12 – 5pm

Co-presented by the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), Berkeley School of Optometry, and the Zero1 Biennial

]]> http://oakesoakes.com/uncategorized/uc-berkeley-show/feed/ 0 http://oakesoakes.com/uncategorized/ndmoa-show/ http://oakesoakes.com/uncategorized/ndmoa-show/#comments Mon, 03 Sep 2012 08:26:29 +0000 admin http://oakesoakes.com/?p=952

Installation view at the North Dakota Museum of Art

Solo Exhibition

The Oakes Twins

North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND

August 7 – September 30, 2012

Collaborating since the age of three, the identical twin artists, Ryan and Trevor Oakes, create perspective drawings from nature and architecture using an innovative concave easel, invented as part of their ongoing exploration of human vision and the experience of space and depth.

The Twins have developed a remarkable new method for tracing the world before them onto a curved surface, completely freehand and by eye alone. This method has been described, by no less an authority than Columbia University’s perceptual historian Jonathan Crary, as one of the most original breakthroughs in the rendering of visual space since the Renaissance.

]]> http://oakesoakes.com/uncategorized/ndmoa-show/feed/ 0 http://oakesoakes.com/exhibitions/past/929/ http://oakesoakes.com/exhibitions/past/929/#comments Mon, 03 Sep 2012 06:28:04 +0000 admin http://oakesoakes.com/?p=929

Image © Oakes Oakes 2012, EMPAC Concert Hall

Solo Exhibition / Residency

The Periphery of Perception

EMPAC — Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center
at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — Troy, NY

February 21 – June 31, 2012

Identical twins Ryan and Trevor Oakes engage in probing studies of visual perception and light through material investigations, discovering methods that constitute key advancements in the representation of visual reality. This winter they were in residence, creating a spherical drawing of our Concert Hall. This drawing will mark the first time the Oakes brothers re-envision the structure of their drawings to trace the perimeter of binocular vision. This new work will be shown as part of The Periphery of Perception — an exhibition looking at the development of the Oakes’ work over the past 10 years.

“Art is the playground of the physical world. Light is the medium of all visual art. Any piece of visual material—art, nature, literature—that might spark awe in the mind will come through the gates of the eyes.” —The Oakes Twins

Curator: Emily Berçir Zimmerman

]]> http://oakesoakes.com/exhibitions/past/929/feed/ 0 http://oakesoakes.com/artwork/vision/03-vision/ http://oakesoakes.com/artwork/vision/03-vision/#comments Sun, 02 Sep 2012 22:03:25 +0000 admin http://oakesoakes.com/?p=914 Schulte Home In Early Spring Fog,
2011
Concave drawing
Ink on cotton paper
20 x 21 x 10 in | 51 x 53 x 25 cm

]]> http://oakesoakes.com/artwork/vision/03-vision/feed/ 0 http://oakesoakes.com/artwork/vision/02-vision/ http://oakesoakes.com/artwork/vision/02-vision/#comments Sun, 02 Sep 2012 21:53:52 +0000 admin http://oakesoakes.com/?p=911 Getty Gardens,
2012
Concave drawing
Ink on cotton paper
20 x 21 x 10 in | 51 x 53 x 25 cm

]]> http://oakesoakes.com/artwork/vision/02-vision/feed/ 0 http://oakesoakes.com/artwork/vision/01-vision/ http://oakesoakes.com/artwork/vision/01-vision/#comments Sun, 02 Sep 2012 21:28:32 +0000 admin http://oakesoakes.com/?p=905 EMPAC Concert Hall
at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI),
2012
Double sphere concave drawing
Ink on cotton paper
25 x 36 x 20 in | 64 x 91 x 51 cm

]]> http://oakesoakes.com/artwork/vision/01-vision/feed/ 0 http://oakesoakes.com/artwork/paintings/13-paintings-2/ http://oakesoakes.com/artwork/paintings/13-paintings-2/#comments Sun, 02 Sep 2012 20:56:44 +0000 admin http://oakesoakes.com/?p=885 Unified Field (contracting),
2012
Cotton paper
39 x 32 in | 99 x 81 cm

]]> http://oakesoakes.com/artwork/paintings/13-paintings-2/feed/ 0