Jacob Kassay | OTNY

Each of the three groups of work in Kassay’s exhibition approaches embodied memories in a different way. These include a rubber grip on the handrail for the stairs connecting the Albright-Knox’s 1962 and 1905 Buildings impressed on its underside with the braille letter H repeated thousands of times, creating a subtly changed and suddenly legible experience of climbing the Albright-Knox’s staircase, and at the top of the stairs is an architectural fragment that refuses to “go” anywhere, an oddly familiar dead end that troubles the inherently functional character of domestic space. In a separate gallery is a series of eight aluminum volumes covered with collections of both unopened and half-used home stuffs. Hauntingly, these common objects float above the floor within their sculptural substructures, their strange bedfellows illustrating the absurdity of our illusion of domestic order and capturing the surreality of objects that familiarity had rendered practically invisible.

Kassay’s meditation on our rote navigation of domestic life reminds us of the extent to which we deploy, unaware, a kind of self-defense that allows us to normalize and internalize even exceptionally strange developments in order to continue operating in the world. This is a useful skill, but also one that risks making us blind.