Cultured magazine profiles Brian Oakes, a 30-year-old New York-based artist featured in their 2025 Young Artists list. Oakes creates intricate works that resemble a mad scientist's lab, including a miniature sorting machine exhibited at Blade Study in 2024 that rhythmically sorts diorama-like tableaux. Their practice also involves circuit boards, synthetic gemstones (opals, rubies, emeralds, and now sapphires), and magnetic core memory modules, exploring themes of value, automation, desire, and divination as a systematized asset.
This profile matters because it highlights an emerging artist whose work critically engages with contemporary systems of labor, prediction, and memory—topics increasingly relevant in an automated world. Oakes's inclusion in Cultured's Young Artists list signals their rising prominence in the art world, and their ambitious hypothetical projects (a full supply chain, a sorting facility, an automated factory) underscore a generation of artists rethinking production and value through hands-on, conceptually rigorous making.