ARTIST CV

PRESS RELEASE

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Mister Fahrenheit is very pleased to present Komedy Cellar, a site-specific project by Jacob Kassay. Reframing the gallery space through systems of new sculpture and painting, this exhibition marks Mister Fahrenheit’s sixth season.

 

For nearly two decades, New York-based artist Jacob Kassay has used objects to probe experiences of surroundings. Finely tuned to the sites they occupy, the artist’s works draw attention to the implicit, routine-based practices and beliefs that shape the ways in which we navigate, rationalize, and normalize our movement through familiar spaces. By harnessing peripheral, often overlooked attributes of their settings, such as interior architectures and ambient qualities of light, air, and noise, Kassay’s installations subtly activate a type of physical memory that works to breach the rote habits and ingrained perceptions we construct around objects, our environments, and representations of the world at large.

 

In his project at Mister Fahrenheit, Kassay amplifies this haptic sense through direct engagements with site and language, specifically that of live, stand-up comedy. Titled in reference to the eponymous underground comedy club located blocks away from the gallery, Komedy Cellar punctuates the space’s architecture with a series of shaped handrail sculptures affixed to walls, lining elevations, and bisecting pathways. Echoing the artist’s use of braille in earlier iterations of this work, these new railings transcribe a single performance into hardware that is scaled to the room: embossed in cells of raised pins along the surface of each metal support are sections of a joke. Configured in linear progressions much like the structure of a joke itself, these film-like guides physically encode and compress the “live” element of comedy – its suspenseful pauses, outbursts, and audience chatter – into an aluminum infrastructure of precisely gauged lengths, contours, and temperatures. Without image or sound, rhetorical devices like setup, misdirection, and punchline find material analogues in sharp bends, dead-ends, and a condensation-covered segment of frozen railing. As viewers navigate around, under, and between these supports by touch, they are looped through a system akin to the many ambient, machinic processes which continually abstract and circulate us. A joke is extruded into scaffolding; laughs and language are rendered into linear feet.

 

While the railings stretch a joke’s delivery to the dimensions of the site, two groupings of silver paintings tucked into sections within the upper and lower gallery areas use the room’s architecture to a similarly uncanny and comic effect. Stacked together along their profiles, the canvases appear to be rows of dormant paintings in storage. From the front, however, the gag is revealed: they lack a solid face and are instead partial frames painted and stretched, more set prop and surrogate support than fully fleshed painting and surface. On their edges, slight variations of textures, colors, and burns mark each, vestiges of the hand-priming and chemical plating process that Kassay has implemented since 2005. The stacks of canvases do not mirror their surroundings as images but reduce reflection to its bare minimum, as their edges catch blurred slivers of light, shadow, and color. Scaled to the iconic double doors of the Comedy Cellar, a set of canvases downstairs mimes the entrance to the club, but like the railings, their hollow interiors suggest that the memories contained by objects may only be echoes and warped resonances of whatever life permeated them. 

 

These reverberations linger in the smallest work in the show, which contains only part of a face. Hung at eye-level along the gallery’s arched feature wall is a head-sized painting of a human mouth, open wide like a comedy caricature, and filled with brass teeth. It appears to laugh ­­­­­– if only we knew the joke.

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Born in 1984 in Lewiston, NY, Jacob Kassay currently lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Khiropractik, Art : Concept, Paris (2024); Chelsea, 303 Gallery, New York (2024); IT, Ivory Tars, Glasgow (2023); Never Before Seen Footage of Woodstock, Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels (2023); Nobody’s Home, 1413 5th Ave, New York (2022); and Footage, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY (2019). Kassay has participated in numerous group exhibitions at international venues including MoMA PS1, New York; The Wattis Institute, San Francisco; FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Angoulême, France; and Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy. The artist’s work was included in the 8th Gwangju Biennale (2010) and can presently be found in the public collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; and FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Angoulême, France, among others worldwide.