SEED

Brian Oakes

September 4th — October 20th, 2024

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 SEED, 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.

ASRS 1 (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. Display Case 2 (A Garden), 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.

Translation provided by DeepL

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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