The exhibition showcases a new body of work from the artist known for his intricate and immersive works made from hundreds of handmade kites. Hashimoto's works are mesmerizing environments full of color, pattern and movement for the viewer to get lost in.
Jacob Hashimoto was born to a Japanese-Irish family in Greeley, Colorado, in 1973. In 1996, the 23-year-old Hashimoto was nearing the end of his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The profound interest in Mark Rothko’s dark, incandescent landscape-abstractions and Agnes Martin’s delicate constructivism of his student years no longer seemed to offer a way forwards. Do something, build model airplanes or kites, was his father’s advice to the son who had run out of inspiration.
During his final year as a student, Hashimoto made about 70 kites in his studio. A reassessment of radical means of expression and media had begun. The painter’s tools were abandoned and the mark of the brush was replaced by what was to be the basic element of Hashimoto’s works: a monochrome or multi-coloured module – the “kite”.
Kites have a long history, since they have been made in China ever since the 6th century, but their story may go back much further, and they have been defying gravity for highly diverse reasons throughout their existence. Nowadays, kites are associated with exercise, leisure time and sheer dolce far niente– sweet id-leness. Kites are vehicles of optimism.
Behind Hashimoto’s kites is the Japanese handicraft tradition, complemented, for instance, by the Thai and Indian kite traditions. But Hashimoto’s ethereal kites do not fly; they are circular, elliptical, square or hexa-hedron-shaped modules, fundamental image-units which when combined can grow into large installations that take over the space. Hashimoto’s materially light art explores the boundary between sculpture and painting, along with questions of abstraction and figuration. Even as abstracts his works contain landscape-like features.
Hashimoto’s art can be approached in different ways. According to a more formalistic reading, the works are about his long-standing interest in the points of intersection between painting and sculpture, and between the landscape and abstraction. Hashimoto is interested not only in architectural space and variations on it, but also in the 3D-kinaesthetics of computer games. The kite-like elements can be seen as being pixels. The interconnected kites form clusters of different colours, out of which enormous mechanisms of movement are constructed, and then shaped by the ever-changing light and motion.
