In Jacob Kassay’s most recent body of work, on view now in Jacob Kassay: OTNY, we rationalize, navigate, and narrate our own movement through space. The artist is particular interested in our haptic memories of those spaces with which we are most familiar, like our homes.

Kassay’s large-scale sculpture BUF is part of a series of sculptures the model the exterior volumes of architectural features. BUF is a proportional representation of a staircase in his parents’ home in Lewiston—but it does not feature any stairs to climb. Disengaged from its role enabling movement through space and rendered with a pristine, white surface in a geometric form that rhymes with Minimalist sculpture, this image of an architectural fragment becomes an oddly familiar dead end and an un-home-like troubling of the inherently functional character of domestic space: a space that refuses to “go” anywhere.