303 Gallery is proud to present Jacob Kassay’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.
You’ve come back, and your return to form is returning to a form: a shape, an outline, a gallery, a neighborhood. Circling back cannot retrace an exact path, and so it is a looping line that stops and starts and crosses over itself, tails and arrows becoming parentheses.
You are here (Chelsea). Is Chelsea here? A constant recurrence, a many-splendored food hall, a public transportation wasteland, a cultural zenith, a paved paradise, a shopping mall, a cliff, a double set of barriers.
The forms are repainted the color of irritation and infatuation. They create parentheticals while on display, enclosing negative space that will be freed or annihilated again once the paintings are taken off the wall (a beginning and an end to each, to each their own).
One parenthesis doesn’t complete a thought (the thought remains unfinished, ongoing; it hangs there, an opening suggesting the possibility of enclosure). It is one half of a broken heart, waiting to become a full capsule.
Every being is made of many doubles (eyes, limbs), and so one is always also seen as a half. A set of twins, then, is a whole—split from a single egg—two sets of parentheses. Two breakable hearts that can fill in for one another, enclosing a universe and a secret language.
Further curl each form into a C, like an arching back that takes up the fetal position, and you have the tone that ((echoes)) throughout the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, where the twins must live before their lives begin.
So, the NICU is “in C,”as IN C is in NICU. Let’s ignore the incorporated connotations (in this Chelsea economy?) and instead add them all up, treating the acronym for the hospital unit as parentheses around the words that denote a musical sound: NIINCCU (beautifully incomplete parallels, two people that were once one and grow to be, eventually, asymmetrical).
C is a tone, a smile, a frown, and a half. C is for Chelsea. And here you are, again, where you began but in every possible way different, seeing the start as a past and the tail end of something as a new start.
– Natasha Stagg