Brian oakes is an interdisciplinary sculptor based in New York. His spatial investigations manifest through means of technocraft such as open source agendas, DIY materiality, satellites, nuclear culture, piracy, and global-political transparencies in outer space. Rhode Island School of Design, MFA.

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Alex Batkin

Ashley Teamer

Brian Oakes

jiwoong

Kyle Clairmont Jacques

Stephen Buscemi

Blade Study is pleased to announce EPIPHANY, a group exhibition focused on the intuitive experience of realization. The internal shift of an epiphany is not linear or universal, it can take the form of a variety of emotional reactions. It is a jolting experience that can evoke terror, or relief, it can be ecstatic, or soothing. Beyond the precise moment of its arrival, an epiphany redirects one’s lifepath and personal philosophy. Works by artists Alex Batkin, Ashley Teamer, Brian Oakes, jiwoong, Kyle Clairmont Jacques, and Stephen Buscemi are brought together to explore this unique emotional state in its various forms.

Acupuncturist Alex Batkin’s expansive artistic practice is informed by ongoing research into ancient health practices and sexual technologies. His four piece sculptural project, Ersatz Phallus Artifacts I-IV, stems from his interest in the depiction of pubic hair in various Greek funerary statues from the 6th century BC, several of which appear to be wearing cock rings. Although this is not directly acknowledged by art historical and literary references, the cock rings’ obvious visual presence became the basis of Batkin’s historically-grounded speculative artistic project, as it occurred to him that kink stretches back to our earliest days as humans. Ersatz Phallus Artifacts I-IV gives emphasis to Batkin’s realization that the maintenance and pleasure of the human body are recreations of a collective, queer past.

Painter and installation artist, Ashley Teamer is inspired by the batture, the fluctuating space of clay and sand between the low-tide of the Mississippi River and the levee. In her words, “The Batture symbolizes the plasticity of our environment, the relationship between humans and nature, and reveals strategies for living with nature in the future.” You Are Now Tuned In… and Bonnet Carré Spillway Vignette speak to the ecological, political conditions of NOLA as historic moments that inform Teamer’s personhood. Both artworks explore how human interventions to make the environment more habitable is fraught with contrasting morals.

Brian Oakes’ kinetic chandelier, Vessel 2, gossips, breathes, and twitches. The sculpture’s projected audio mimics its aural surroundings at a 15 second delay. This is not to say it shares everything it hears. The artwork is selective, picking up some sounds at a range of distances while ignoring others. The echos produced from its feathered tendrils generate a special kind of disorienting attention, making it seem as though Oakes’ work is itself at the fraught moment before a breakthrough.

jiwoong’s site specific installation of Ceramic Light Vessels are the result of years of nightly walks taken by the artist. This practice began as part of the artist’s mandatory military service, followed him through the years of his early adulthood, ultimately informing the artist’s graduate thesis work at Hunter MFA. The sculpture is created by placing silver gelatin print on ceramic rock formations, a process invented by jiwoong. This sprawling work examines the site of epiphany - how the mundane, circulation of movement and place can become generative.

In a moment of personal change, artist and curator Kyle Clairmont Jacques began to fixate on kites. Kites are a meditative reprieve for Jacques, he was drawn to the duality of their “purpose”, their ability to catch the wind transforming an unseen element visible. His sculptural wall work, Flare (2023), is the result of a two year investigation into this original subject, with emphasis on the classic Flare model kite. Rendered in acrylic paint on poly silk over galvanized steel on panel, the poly silk is then dipped in a diluted adhesive that hardens material and allows for translucency.This final object stands in for the process oriented artistic practice Jacques developed in the wake of his own epiphany.

Stephen Buscemi’s airbrushed acrylic paintings depict an air of uncertainty. In his works, Buscemi presents a version of epiphany as an unsettling experience and evolving self. The flanking works of the triptych focus on hazy images of hands reaching through darkness towards an inconclusive future. In the center work, pleading eyes peek through pitch black. Critical to the conceit of the show, Buscemi’s paintings image the grave uncertainty that can accompany a revelation.

Press Release

Epiphany

It’s [You]. [You] are the input for the generator. [You] are the seed. The output generated from [You] will become the logistic network: [You]r Box. In a week, [You]r Box has predicted that [You] will need a table, and it’s already waiting for [You]. In a year [You] will need a steel chair to go with the table, anticipated based on [You]r purchase of dog food, more of which is already in [You]r Box because eventually [You] will Place Your Order. The ore to make the steel to make the chair [You] will receive in a year’s time is in the ground now, but the necessary mining rig is currently in pieces, on a boat, crossing the ocean to [You]r port

Brian Oakes (they/them b. 1995) is a Brooklyn-based sculptor presenting 

, their first solo exhibition with the gallery. Everything starts with organic processes, even industrialization and its decline. To seed is to put creation into motion and refers to any input used to initialize a generative process. The artist’s mechanized artworks explore a commodities journey from conception, production, and logistics, finally landing at display. Oakes is uplifting the chain of events necessary in production, including the use of automated markets, raw materials, by-products, their refinement, and distribution, investigating how worth is determined as objects progress along this chain. Not all seeds become flowers. The exhibition proposes that within hyper-mass individualization, those living under capitalism are the 'SEED' that is being sewn and the world is generated for us and around us.

Consumers have never had more access to industrial processes than now. Oakes’ work is necessitated by these recent changes in mass production that allows the ability to create individual, singular, objects through factory production. Predictive algorithms are the lifeblood of all logistics systems. Utilizing these networks of divination is to commune between the individual and systemic desires. The artist is inserting themself into industrial processes inherited from previous generations of production, exploiting established systems to produce work with the veneer of function that address the process of refinement.

 (2024), which stands for Automated Storage and Retrieval System, is a miniaturized sorting machine engineered by the artist modeled loosely after the real systems that are being adopted by massive distribution centers in ports globally. The sculpture contains other sculptures, which are carefully sorted according to opaque internal logic. The pallets of smaller artworks depicting placid scenes, relic displays, and miniatures. A kinetic work, things are being stored, retrieved and displayed in a ghostly manner. The work proposes a post-human labor consumption pattern that props up contemporary survival, or the absence of touch in industrial sorting.

The artworks in Seed include the raw materials necessary for creating circuits and digital systems. 

, is a wall mounted display case containing: 18 homemade rubies and 18 copper sulfate crystal seeds. Though they appear naturally occurring, the rubies in the display are created by the artist from common materials. This alchemical process troubles the inherent value of the precious stones and synthetic processes. What is more valuable or essential? A ruby produced by an artist, or formed by the earth itself?

With Seed, the artist’s specific interest is exploring the phenomenon of hyper-mass individualization. In general industrial strategy has turned away from abundant generic production. Now, 100,000 individual chairs are produced to 100,000 individual targeted consumers, cultivated and convinced through algorithms, AI, and marketing. Fabricators want to visualize the quarry, the factory and the distribution center nearest to the consumer while acknowledging the unseen predictive coding that facilitates the system in its entirety. Oakes utilizes technocraft, global logistic networks, and the refinement process of precious materials required by modern technology to realize this change in production strategy visual.

Brian Oakes

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