WASHINGTON, DC.- von ammon announced Show Yourself ❄️, its second solo exhibition by New York-based artist Jacob Kassay.

Despite the general expectation that the mind’s attention be trained on a singular object at a time, the senses are mostly bicameral: two hemispheres, two eyes, two ears, and a pair of each sinus. Crying is a stereo-sensory experience. To lose the proper alignment of these twin apparatuses usually portends a critical sense of imbalance.

Love and friendship are extrusions of the individual into a double that cannot really be self-recognized—a spouse may struggle over whom deserves his or her attention in a family photo. Kinship is even more complicated, as the individual will see traces of him or herself, staggered within separate living tissue. Despite the mind’s lust for singularity, life tends to be made up of dyads like these, but ones that progressively fall out of sync nonetheless, which too can produce instability.

The last forty years has seen visual information atomized into parts that can pierce and expand living tissue with ever-intensifying speed and efficiency. Bulky pixels did little to penetrate the senses of civilians. For most of these four decades of diminishing imperviousness, the average American still relied on outdoor recreation, tangible playthings, and keepsakes. Gradually, however, the side-scroller video game morphed into deep renders of lifeless space; the handheld pogo-cam was supplanted by drones.

Kassay’s work—this project in particular—seeks to build a sharpened and abbreviated aesthetic that chronicles this rapid expansion of the perceiving eye’s draw distance. This term refers to the outermost edges of drawn three-dimensional objects in virtual space: even the vastest realms require a flat backdrop. This drawing away of flat space has coincided with a grave diminishing of interpersonal ritual, as the unpeopled realms of game-space become surrogates for the outing, the plaything, the keepsake. The mutual lifespans of the artist artist and the gallerist have coincided almost perfectly with this gradient of increased longing, as the contours of human experience become staggered, artifacted and blurred.

Jacob Kassay (b. 1984, Niagara Falls NY) lives and works in New York.