Artist Jacob Hashimoto @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - "Dreams No Dreams" Exhibition

Jacob Hashimoto: Dreams No Dreams 

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

June 7 – August 18, 2024

Jacob Hashimoto's latest works are a unique blend of seemingly endless streams of images woven together in infinite tangles. His art is a rich tapestry of visual references, ranging from East Asian crafts to Atari circuit boards and from the complex shapes of leaves to the architecture of churches and mosques from the plague era. This profusion of visual references raises intriguing questions: how can a limitless stream of images shape our identity? How does one create a sense of selfhood amidst the visual cacophony of the digital age? These are the themes that Jacob Hashimoto, a Japanese-American artist, explores in his work as he grapples with his fractured cultural heritage.

Jacob Hashimoto's art is a unique blend of sculpture and painting, combining the compositional principles of painting with traditional Japanese bamboo and rice paper handicrafts. His sculptures, made up of countless small paper kites, are not static objects but dynamic entities that subtly move and respond to the space and light around them. This interactive element, along with the myriad abstract patterns and carefully designed graphic details, creates a captivating visual experience within his organic, multi-layered spatial tapestries.

Jacob Hashimoto's exhibition presents a selection of his smaller works alongside a vast installation. Filling up the entire gallery space, the installation forces the viewer to adapt to its imposing presence, requiring us to dodge and watch our step. Thus, movement is brought into the space in a physical dance of give and take.

Jacob Hashimoto (b. 1973) has held numerous exhibitions worldwide at venues including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Governors Island in New York, Turku's Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, and the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Rome. Hashimoto's work is found in prestigious collections such as the LACMA Tacoma Art Museum, the Saastamoinen Foundation, and the Schaufler Foundation. The artist is based in New York.

GALERIE FORSBLOM 

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Jacob Hashimoto @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC - The Disappointment Engine

Jacob Hashimoto 

The Disappointment Engine 

Miles McEnery Gallery, New York 

7 September - 21 October 2023 

Viruses, stained-glass windows, Atari circuit-board patterns, and leaf structures all collide in the eleven new sculptural works in The Disappointment Engine, JACOB HASHIMOTO’s first solo exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery. Loosely referencing East Asian craft traditions, the work also draws from the visual language of weeds and invasive species; radio telescopes; as well as the architecture of churches and mosques built during plagues, all to ask: how might visual sampling exist at the root of identity formation?

Through his artworks, Jacob Hashimoto explores what it means to build an understanding of oneself from scratch, both as a denizen of the visually cacophonous digital age, but also as a Japanese American artist grappling with family histories of internment that resulted in shattered cultural inheritance.

At Miles McEnery Gallery, The Disappointment Engine features an immersive, site-specific hanging installation stretching from wall to wall. Forcing viewers to duck, sidestep, and recalibrate, it initiates a physical dance of give-and-take: otherworldly, but also unapologetic in its right to take up space.

JACOB HASHIMOTO (b. 1973) has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Italy; Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Schauwerk Sindelfingen, Germany; Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku, Finland; SITE Santa Fe, NM; Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas, TX; Tampa Museum of Art, FL; and the Boise Art Museum, ID.

His work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Schauwerk Sindelingen, Germany; Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, WA; Fondation Carmignac, Hyères, France; Civic Art Collection, San Francisco, CA; and the Tokiwabashi Tower Art Collection, Tokyo, Japan, among others. He has lectured at the Rhode Island School of Design; Temple University; The City College of New York; and Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner.

Related Posts on Wanafoto:

Jacob Hashimoto @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago - Misunderstandings - Text by Stephanie Cristello (October 2021)

Jacob Hashimoto @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - Progress (January 2021)

MILES McENERY GALLERY

511 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

www.milesmcenery.com

Jacob Hashimoto @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago - Misunderstandings - Text by Stephanie Cristello

Jacob Hashimoto: Misunderstandings 

Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago 

Through October 23, 2021 

JACOB HASHIMOTO

Not every representation of the world will do, 2021

Bamboo, acrylic, paper, wood, and Dacron

56 3/8 x 81 7/8 x 8.25 inches

(c) Jacob Hashimoto, Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery

At its best, art writing adopts the approach of the method actor: the writer enters the psyche of the artist, and in this act of self-deception, strings together words into a text whose structure adopts how the artist thinks. The reader should leave with the phantom of an encounter that emulates the work. It is a practice in forced empathy that hinges upon the transmutation of the writer’s mind into the artist’s hand. In this process of fictionalization, effective writing about art veers away from translation and description and instead inches toward fabrication and fantasy—a falsehood that communicates visuality more truthfully through text. Harold Bloom called this purposeful misunderstanding of a source (for him literature, but here as art), ‘poetic misprision’; a term that defines how a fact-based reading of reality must suffer to reach closer accuracy. 

For an artist like Jacob Hashimoto (b. Colorado, 1973), in his seventh solo exhibition entitled Misunderstandings at Rhona Hoffman Gallery,  one must  think in layers. The sculptures are made of  dense compositions  of elaborately patterned and collaged  bamboo and rice paper kites. Kaleidoscopic images emerge that reference virtual space, natural environments , the cosmos etc.Though remarkably stable, their images imbue a , movable quality that is closer to woven textiles, or pixels, than to canvas. Working against the demand of linear logic—the urge for artists to provide digestible explanations into the ‘meaning’ behind their work, particularly in abstraction—lies at the core of Hashimoto’s resistance toward the dogmatic impulse, which the artist credits as contributing to “the death of poetry.” The deficiency is not that of language, but how it is instrumentalized. 

Bypassing the persistent and vexing Greenbergian dilemma of painting vs. sculpture—when has it mattered?—Hashimoto’s work encourages us to address stratums of experience. We can imagine a text that portrays being, as if we were the threads of string passing through the eye of a needle. Or tessellating sheets of sliced paper in states of suspension upon a filament. Perhaps passages that observe how flatness is transferred back into atmosphere; two dimensions separated in subtle distances by veils of air. We could adopt the description of a pastoral landscape that has been interrupted. In this collection of wall-based works, angular lines cut through the sky, like the trail of a jet when it passes over a cloudless expanse, or otherwise collect in the vapors cast in deep violet and red light above a field during a twilight thunderstorm.

In Misunderstandings, the titles of the works on view hover between deception and control, as well as types of pathetic fallacy—a literary device that describes exterior natural phenomena to communicate an inner psychological landscape. In each of the three larger compositions, a relationship to nature is approached in the Romantic sense; cues that allude to the anthropomorphizing of the elements (air, water, earth, and fire). In The innocent life of lightning (2021), a highlighter yellow line passes above and below a reddened geometric field. Amid these works, the micro informs the macro, and vice versa. The temporality of Hashimoto’s marks, imbued upon their lasting surfaces as works of art, is cued through the artist’s choice in words. In To catch a glimpse of the sky (2021), a series of five small cumulous forms appear to be made from patches of black starry sky. Upon closer inspection, we see that this effect is achieved through the pattern of white pixel squares upon navy paper. Representation, like a flash of lightning, appears and goes just as quickly—yet the desire for a gestalt effect, to see the recognizable reflected in abstraction, remains. 

Hashimoto’s constructions—the separation and amalgamation of individual parts to compose a whole—evolve in relation to the mind of the viewer. They are not sealed off, but rather functionally and conceptually open. Which is to say that within a global context their meaning changes as the world changes. They encourage viewers to look and learn how to create meaning: this skill of navigation is required by the artist and audience alike. Like mood rings, as the perception of the work moves from person to person, its magic is activated—a way of seeing that is as external as it is a report from the interior.

—Stephanie Cristello

Stephanie Cristello is a contemporary art curator, critic, and author living in Chicago, IL. 

www.stephaniecristello.com 

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY

1711 West Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60622

www.rhoffmangallery.com

Jacob Hashimoto @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - Progress

Jacob Hashimoto: Progress

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

January 8 – 31, 2021

JACOB HASHIMOTO’s (b. 1973) latest works were born during the strange time of the pandemic, a time of existing isolation from each other and the outside world. His new works came into being when, alone in his studio, Jacob Hashimoto began reflecting on the course of human history and the contagious diseases that have plagued us over the centuries. However, the common theme of his new works is not despair but hope and a sense of possibility. 

Jacob Hashimoto’s vast breadth of allusions ranges from cellular automata to global upheavals – from Methuselah cell patterns to the Irish Potato Famine. Some of his visual references are highly subtle, such as the arched passageways of the Doge’s Palace in Venice, which invoke the Black Death, the deadly pandemic that wreaked havoc across Europe and Eurasia centuries ago. Other allusions refer to Jacob Hashimoto’s hometown, New York, which bursts into bloom with spring arrival. 

Jacob Hashimoto’s works fall somewhere between painting and sculpture, combining the compositional principles of painting with traditional Japanese bamboo and papercrafts. His installations are made up of countless miniature paper kites that flutter almost imperceptibly in the changing light and air currents in the exhibition space. Despite the organically layered effect they evoke, his installations comprise abstract, graphic details that involved highly meticulous planning. 

JACOB HASHIMOTO has been featured in numerous solo museum exhibitions worldwide, including MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, New York’s Governors Island, WAM Turku City Art Museum, and Rome’s MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art. His work is found in numerous major public collections such as the LACMA Tacoma Art Museum, the Saastamoinen Foundation, and the Schaufler Foundation. The artist is based in New York.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22 - 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

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