- Jacob Kassay
jacob kassay, no goal, april 11 2012, the powerstation
"This emergence insists on the power that things have in and over our lives. While being the banalities, oddities, or necessities that simply occupy space, they are also what make it possible to leave that space altogether. Objects all hold the endless capacity to estrange us from the comfort of the given and evoke what remains unseen or previously unthought - from the slightest nuances to upsettingly jarring experiences. An object can do this on its own, but it can also do it as a series of object working together...
The artwork, is in a sense an object within a larger object, just like a person can exist on his or her own, but when a mass of people begin to form, a different mentality emerges altogether. The movement, the feeling, and the ardor of the mass sings a different song from the single person. The mass can envelope you; the person can face you. The song can wash over you; the note can strike you. A room of red roses overwhelms you, a single R O S E endears you. Each has its own particular cadence, resulting from the separateness of each, albeit with rather blurry borders. One often focuses on these borders to suggest that there is no object, only a convenient fiction of the mind. Close inquiry at the edge of an object apparently reveals that its solidity is purely fabricated - it is instead a radical fraying: porous, trembling, a dynamic glut of flux. Implicit in this perspective is an effective atomization of the world, where one can always look closer and see that things are not what they S E E M...
It might be then assumed that the force of an object is entirely based on its relations: no inherent force of the object without light, without a spectator, without someone comparing and contrasting. Certainly no object exists within a vacuum, but no object can be fully revealed in its relations. No amount of probing or prying, copying or recreating will exhaust the object. It always has some hidden reserve. Without such a reserve, the relations between objects could not continue to surprise. We are on occasion held in a trance by such a selection of things. For sometimes objects conspire to expand and contract space and vision, doing so by relying on both the apparent features of each individual object, and the more transcendent features of the experience of the whole."
all text taken from press release, parts/whole