DIOSCURI: Ryan and Trevor Oakes in conversation with Brett Littman
March 29, 2018
ARTIST TALK
DIOSCURI: Ryan and Trevor Oakes in conversation with Brett Littman
When they were young, brothers Giorgio de Chirico and Alberto Savinio, while not actually twins, thought of themselves as two halves of one mind and called themselves the Dioscuri—the Greek name for Castor and Pollux, the twin brothers of Greek and Roman mythology.
Trevor and Ryan Oakes are identical twin brothers and artists who have developed a collaborative practice. They too feel like two halves of one mind. Being mirror-image twins (one is right-handed, the other left-handed), their strengths tend to be complementary, similar to the way the right brain and left brain contribute differing approaches to cognition.
The Oakes’ creative collaboration centers on an investigation into human perception of light and space. In the process they’ve created an entirely new method for depicting the act of seeing that uses the binocular collaboration of the two eyes in an innovative way. Their spherically concave drawings and paintings echo the curvature of the eye. Lawrence Weschler in The New York Times called their art “one of the most intriguing breakthroughs in the depiction of physical reality since the Renaissance.”
Join us for an evening with the Oakes Twins, in conversation with Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center, to reflect on modes of seeing, brotherly collaboration, and the art of Alberto Savinio.
Program schedule:
6pm – registration and viewing of Alberto Savinio
6:20pm – conversation program, followed by Q&A
7:30pm – program concludes, viewing of exhibition
8pm – doors close
Speaker biographies:
Trevor and Ryan Oakes’ art is in collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Getty Research Institute, LA; The Field Museum, Chicago; and the New York Public Library, NY. Their public art works have been exhibited in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Chicago O’Hare International Airport, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. They exhibit and lecture internationally, and their artist residencies include The Drawing Center, NY; The Getty Center, LA; and the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy. They have had solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Mathematics, NY; the North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND; and The Field Museum, Chicago. The Oakes Twins graduated from Cooper Union in 2004 and live and work in New York City.
Since 2007, Brett Littman has been the Executive Director of The Drawing Center, based in SoHo, New York. His interests are multi-disciplinary and he has overseen more than seventy-five exhibitions over the last decade dealing with visual art, craft, design, architecture, music, science, and literature. Littman is also an art critic and lecturer, an active essayist for museum and gallery catalogs and has written articles for a wide range of United States-based and international art, fashion, and design magazines.
