Driscoll Babcock Galleries presents Logical Guesses, a group exhibition curated by House of the Nobleman. Logical Guesses features a diverse group of artists who express aesthetic variations through calculations, patterns, and equations. Favoring rational hypothesis over emotional development, these artists manipulate light and materials to explore the properties and illusions of space.
Rather than spontaneity, these artists engage with specific rule systems and guidelines to perpetuate a unique engagement with object and form. These shared philosophies of production imbue their works with a sense of the absolute, inevitably linked through evolution, variation and dynamical phenomena, and their systematic processes elicit an innate consistency throughout the exhibition.
Logical Guesses features work by Harriet Bart, Jarrod Beck, Marylyn Dintenfass, Alice Hope, Sol Lewitt, Charles Lutz, Ryan and Trevor Oakes, and James Scott.
Included in the exhibition is Jarrod Beck’s monumental Terminal Moraine, 2012. Using plaster, cast from drawings, as a three-dimensional substrate, Beck reprocesses materials in order to create new tools. The evolution of this work corresponds to a slow architecture, drawn full scale. Lines become form, each member dependent on the other. Through his methodic approach, organic and fixed patterns emerge, reflecting the natural order of creation.
James Scott’s multifaceted process of painting, model-making, and the flattening and folding of form, furthers this exploration of the nuances of spatial illusions. Scott’s calculated engineering of two-dimensional and three-dimensional space creates perforated patterns of overlapping hyper-cubes which couple abstract drawing with architectural drafting. In Untitled 1 and Untitled 2, 2013, light filters through precisely mapped holes, projecting overlapping images and shadows onto the adjoining walls and ceiling. As the intensity of light subtly changes throughout the course of the day, so do the dynamic characteristics of the work.
Ryan and Trevor Oakes create highly detailed drawings, paintings, and sculptures that explore, among other topics, fundamental aspects of light and vision. Their works in this exhibition operate within the theory that by following consistent local rules complex global structures emerge. For example, Matchstick Dome, 2014, emerges into a spherical shape as a result of packing individual matches side by side. Each of the 9000 matchsticks used in the piece point to a single focal point at the hollow center of the sphere. This emergent form is geometrically akin to the way light rays radiate from a single source, and the shape by which they are inversely received by the eye. Explorations such as this led to one of their central assertions; the human field of vision is spherical.
House of the Nobleman is a progressive curatorial and art advisory firm with offices in London and New York City. Founded in 2010, House of the Nobleman has established itself as an innovative and acclaimed organization specializing in cutting-edge curatorial projects, artist management, as well as a reputable adviser for elite clientele.