NYAB Event - "The Oakes Twins" Exhibition

"The Oakes Twins" Exhibition

CUE Art Foundation

This event has ended.

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

Since birth we've been visually and tactilely focused. As kids we gravitated toward games that involved spatial play such as juggling and unicycling. As growing artists, we spent much of our time observing aspects of the physical world that we found commanding, such as noting that a bumble bee flies in a path of coiling figure 8's. We have always liked order and systems, and we're methodical.

Early on, for subject matter in our art, we tended toward the investigation of center points. Centrally oriented clusters where things collected, or from which they dispersed, seemed to be everywhere in the physical world—from atoms to the human embryo to city centers to planetary bodies. Their abundance gives them significance, and we chose to focus much of our early art around the investigation and creation of center points.

Within the territory of center points, light in particular became a primary focus. Light bursting into a growing sphere from its source; the eye extracting an inverted spherical burst of light from the air, converging at the pupil; and space as it appears to shrink to a vanishing point on the horizon line are among the center-point phenomena present within light. Light, the eyes looking via light, and the space they ultimately take in, thus became the core of our artistic exploration.