The Mind's Eyes (Investigating Vision through Art)

Since childhood, Ryan and Trevor Oakes—artists and identical twins—have been engaged in a collaborative investigation of light and the way our eyes and minds perceive it. This investigation they have carried out through, and in service of, their shared artistic practice. Their best-known works are a series of concave perspective drawings and paintings whose shape is based on the insight that the light rays intercepted by the human eye are the radii of a sphere. The twins execute these concave works with their “double-ghost drawing” technique, which turns their own defocused binocular vision into a kind of camera lucida, allowing them trace what they see one narrow strip at a time.

In The Mind’s Eyes, the Oakes twins recount their entire artistic journey: their childhood experiments with eyesight and perception; their education at the Cooper Union, where they created rule-based sculptures whose emergent forms led them to a new understanding of the geometry of light and vision; and the nearly two-decade evolution of their concave perspective works, in which they have relentlessly explored line, form, and, more recently, the representation of the passage of time.

This book is illustrated with more than 70 full-page reproductions of the Oakeses’ finest works, as well as a pop-up reproduction of one of their concave drawings. The Mind’s Eyes will appeal not only to followers of contemporary art but to anyone who is interested in perception, cognition, and the connections between art and science.