Tuesday, May 25, 2010

it's on DesignBoom

jacob hashimoto


jacob hashimoto is one of the most interesting young
activists in the contemporary art scene.
what he does with paper creates real magic -
a ravishing cascade of cloud white paper shapes flowing
from ceiling to floor like a waterfall frozen by winters icy breath.
viewing the piece fills you with a deep and profound stillness.

jacob hashimoto is perhaps best-known for his installations
in which he creates large-scale sculptural forms out of
thousands of 'kites'.
drawing on the tradition of kite making, he creates each
of the kites by hand, using bamboo rods, string,
and offset prints.
for all of their exquisite lightness and ethereality,
the sculptures are expression of air, light, and space.

hashimoto's craftsman-like activity of making the elements
by hand is central in his works.
the pieces embody the meditative rhythm of repetitive
esecution (the tying and knotting involved in their making).

the use of japanese paper gives his work a very strong
connection to the natural world.
for indeed the paper is born from the bark of a living plant,
cleansed in the swiftly rinning waters of a winter river,
and finally, in sheet form, dried by wind and sun on boards
hewn from forest wood...

hashimoto is now involved in works with a greater complexity
at the planning stage. he uses new technologies, such as
computerised three-dimensional drawing.
we'll stay tuned to the results.

Click on

VIDEO

Working on Canvas

Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel – 2008
Acrylic, paper, urethane on linen
48 x 38.5 x 4 cm
Single Black Cloud – 2008
Acrylic, paper, urethane on linen
48 x 38.5 x 4 cm
Some things you cant’t ignore – 2007
Acrylic, paper, urethane on linen
48 x 38.5 x 4 cm
Submerged – 2008
Acrylic, paper, urethane on linen
48 x 38.5 x 4 cm

At a Glance









JACOB HASHIMOTO – September 2006
32 pages – text by Luca Massimo Barbero (Italian/English)
15 colour reproductions - 35 black/white
for viewing only

Space Like a Breath

Jacob Hashimoto’s work really is a Luxury for the Eye and for visual perception. It could also be defined as a Feast for the Eye, but that would be imposing a limit. Probably you will be asking what the difference is between the two statements. So, a feast is thought out, organised, or it derives from momentary, ephemeral, hedonistic typicality. Luxury for the eye (not to be confused with luxury goods which, recently, have been mistaken for art objects) is difficult to arrive at, like a delicious yet, at the same time, dangerous balance that, once it has revealed itself, must remain so. For ever.

I’ve always loves Jacob’s ability to manoeuvre himself physically, together with his work, through areas and techniques and different methods while maintaining an unvaried coherence which is though, at the same time, variable. His incessant technological action with positives and negatives in his Waterblocks and, with the same concept though manually in this case, in the wall pieces reconfirms his almost paradoxical aim of repeating through variations while never repeating himself.

Working in this way he allows us a Luxury, he creates it for those of us who are viewing a complex space, so concentrated and thought through that it even seems at first sight airy and minimal, happy and carefree. Which, in fact, it isn’t, or at least it isn’t just that. Let’s take these new wall pieces as an example, almost as though using them to construct a possible story on the basis of the work of this artist, a story to be told one step at a time. For some years now monochrome white seems to be at the heart of his large-scale works. Immense white elements make up infinite suspended works. The same colour is used for various works in private collections where the elements or, as some call them, the kites are at a great height and are often seen against a light source which exalts the white purity and a symbolism that is as luminous as it is abstract. White too are the flowering spheres of his artificial and ironic Trees and so are the elements of
Microbursting Thunderhead where light was the effective, electrical part of the sculpture itself. And so too are certain apparently monochrome new white wall-pieces and, in order to define them better, I would like to write that they are “anchored to the walls”, almost as though they were trying to give rhythm and order to the high points and threads that have the precise task of “anchoring these extraordinary cloudlike apparitions” to a portion of the wall and to its airy protrusion into space. …”


Catalogue Writing

JACOB HASHIMOTO - February 2002
32 pages - texts by Angela Vettese and Irvin Hashimoto (Italian/English)
10 colour reproductions - 9 black/white
for viewing only

Jacob Hashimoto Through European Eyes

Jacob Hashimoto's work is marked by two geographical parameters: Japan, where his father’s family came from, and Los Angeles where he lives and works. These two such apparently distant points have, in time, drawn closer together, both as a result of improved transport and, above all, because of the Pacific Ocean that links them. This has led to the increasing mixture of peoples and to the close relations between the two cultures. Nowadays there are many maps in existence that place the Pacific at the center of the world and thus underline the relationship between the two neighboring coasts.

For a European it is difficult to resist the temptation to see in Hashimoto's work an example of this link. From the Japanese side he inherits a deliberate and precise method of working, almost inconceivable for a European, one capable of creating 3000 circles of silk, each 18 centimeters in diameter, which are then suspended by threads in an airy mass that seems to descend from the heavens. For some time, in fact, Hashimoto has been making tiny kites of paper or other flexible materials held together by wooden struts and twine and then assembled in a conceptually simple but practically elaborate method.

What is now on show in Verona is the most recent evolution of a work that aims at occupying space without either the heaviness of sculpture or a reduction to a simple play of light. It is part of a tradition of complexity resolved into simplicity that is to be found as much in a fugue by Bach as in recent minimalist music. …”

JACOB HASHIMOTO – June 2005
16 pages – text by Michael Haggerty (Italian/English)
16 colour reproductions
€ 10

In art as in music repetition is a dangerous procedure: it often seems that there is no reason why a work should ever end while wishing that it would. But sequences were used by many baroque composers to create fascinating structures and are, in fact, still as much a part of classical as of popular music.

And sequences, small phrases repeated at varying pitches, might be kept in mind when considering the recent and past art of Jacob Hashimoto, for a creative use of them is never simple repetition but variation. In his ‘ceiling’ pieces hundreds and hundreds of identical kites were suspended to create grand masses, and here it was the different heights of the kites that created the variation. In some of his recent work, instead, he has flattened his assemblage of elements against the wall, and here it is the elements that vary in size, colour, and also at times in material, though they are ranked uniformly in length and distance from the wall. Their three-dimensionality has been compressed in comparison with other aspects of his output, but the myriad coloured elements now often playfully contradict the works’ shallow space. Physically we can see how far from the wall they are, but a step back and the space seems shaken up, small bright shapes leap outwards while others retire and visually seem to be behind the wall itself. The sequential elements give the works their undeniable stability, their monumentality even, but the dappled colours and tiny forms are what add movement, life, and creative ambiguity.

Catalogue Writing

JACOB HASHIMOTO - July 2003
32 pages - text by Luca Massimo Barbero (Italian/English)
16 colour reproductions - 13 black/white
€ 10

Space... is formed, traveled through, and heard. He suspends in order to meditate, he maneuvers those full/ empty paradoxical masses and, in a contemporary poem, imprisons water, light, geometry, pattern or ‘landscape’, and makes them sing together. It is as though in man’s experience nature is materialized both positively and negatively. The parts do not negate each other but interpenetrate and have the same source: they fascinate each other. And this happens in anything but a superficial way: it is the result of great curiosity, as though the eye had become a detective and the act of making simply a way of embodying these endless yet exact inquiries. Jacob reflects on the multiple essence of concretizing space, as though in his mind he had found a measurement-molecule fascinated by space and which wanted to materialize it, make it useable and visible but without overdoing it, without arriving at a heavy sense of realism. It is this extraordinary and at times (as we shall see) dangerous fascination that almost literally attacks you on entering one of his shows. Suddenly you find yourself among hundreds or thousands of units, fragments completed to form a whole, suspended marks that distribute themselves in space and form it, giving it new life rather than occupying it. And there you are, amazed and transfixed, virtually suspended yourself, counting and visually journeying through these materials (which in the past have been silk, paper, fabric) and these thousands of threads that hold up and make possible this new world ... And this is the first, elementary phase.

And then a kind of revelation makes you abandon resistance: there is no longer any decoration, any manual virtuosity or mathematical repetition, there is just the work that draws itself together, breathes, moves, and allows you to respire in another way: with the eyes, here in this room. An absolute variable is what Jacob’s past installations categorically recall.

For some years I have literally spied on his work on the few occasions I’ve been able to see it in Italy. At times I’ve experienced it briefly, at others with an almost indecent stare, almost obsessively analytical, searching every detail, each knot, link, bamboo spill, stitch or whatever. Then I allowed the images to sediment in time and, late one morning in Verona, he and I met and got to know each other without talking about the work, listening to the music he plays while hanging his show and ... Without any taping, we chatted civilly using as our excuse for talking the waters of the river Adige running nearby. … “

Installation Pieces


Forests Collapsed Upon Forests - 2009 acrylic, paper/bamboo, nylon

Installazione, Ottobre 2008


INFINITUM – 2009 Palazzo Fortuny – Venezia Installation view


Jacob Hashimoto - Professional Day Basel 2004