False Mirrors - Jacob Kassay

Jacob Kassay's electroplated silver canvases look a lot like old worn mirrors but use today's technology to attain their appearance. If, like me, you have no idea what electroplating is, its a super cool process of plating that uses electrical current to reduce cations (positively charged ions) of a desired material to coat an object with a thin layer of the material, such as a metal. While electroplating dates back to the 1800s its a pretty new and inventive concept for art.

The plating concept burns the unpainted canvas, so at times the pieces look black and burnt on the corners. In several of Kassay's pieces the burn marks extend into the shiny faces of the panels giving them a mirror like appearance.

Joseph Wolin notes "The way that these thin silver surfaces delicately capture the traces of whatever stands before them evokes photography, with its light-sensitive emulsions of metal salts. But film photography as a technology has now been surpassed by digital—just as photography itself once usurped the province of painting—making Kassay's metal coatings feel like bronzed baby shoes, elegies to an unrecoverable past."