Brian Oakes
Lumen Spectra
11/15 – 12/20
Members Preview: 11/13/2025
Opening Reception: 11/15/2025

Exhibition Statement:

We are pleased to present Lumen Spectra, the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Brooklyn-based artist Brian Oakes.

Rooted in a sculptural language that fuses computation, craft, and the uncanny physicality of technology, Oakes’s work transforms the materials and mechanisms of the digital age into meditations on perception and embodiment. His practice, what he describes as technocraft, explores how open source tools and hand-built systems can reveal the poetry and strangeness within our networked lives. Through these works, screens become thresholds, cables become nerves, and light itself becomes a material of inquiry.

In Lumen Spectra, Oakes extends this investigation into the infrastructures of our attention. Each sculpture acts as both conduit and relic: illuminated forms that recall lamps, chandeliers, or circuitry brought to life. Hardware is exposed and recomposed to reveal its quiet potential for emotion, memory, and revelation. By treating the devices of our everyday as artifacts of a shared subconscious, Oakes asks how the objects around us still shape what we imagine as immaterial.

“Light has always been the signal beneath the surface of my work,” Oakes notes. “In these pieces, it becomes the system itself, the medium that structures how we look, think, and feel.”

Together, these works reflect Oakes’s ongoing dialogue between the physical and the digital is an invitation to witness how illumination itself becomes both signal and soul, casting light on the strange terrain between presence and perception..

BIO: 

Brian Oakes (b. 1989, Brooklyn) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice merges computation, sculpture, and craft. Their work has been exhibited at Blade Study (New York), Coeval Magazine’s online projects, and in group exhibitions across the U.S. Oakes received their BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. They live and work in Brooklyn.