In Greek mythology, Procustes was a bandit who physically stretched people, or cut off their legs to force them to precisely fit the size of an iron bed. Stemming from this brutal dimension or properties to confirm to its measure.
Jacob Kassay's glass sculptures invert this Procustean logic, which is to say, beds are bent around bodies. Rather than conforming to their containers, their measures determine what encase them. Inset into library books, these glass wedges use the arbitrary, public books, which fit them as temporary supports, acting as lenses which open up the information closed within. Without altering what houses them, the wedges clear an aperture into, illuminate and refract the dormant cores of these circulating objects.
Kassay's sculptures are not only Procustean, but also slightling crustacean. Like the nomadic rovings of the hermit crab, passing from vacant shell to vacant shell, the wedges inhabit library books only in interstices, their coupling bound to the limit leases of the book. In this temporary interlocking, the glass pros open a prismatic space filled with bent gradients of language and o oscillating planes of images into which vision tunnels. While a key typically opens only one door, fixed in place, what Kassay offers in these works is a far more variable form of access into interiors rarely seen in this light - more an entrance briefly held ajar with a book.
