Rhona Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present "The Dark Isn't The Thing To Worry About," the gallery's fifth solo exhibition with New York-based artist Jacob Hashimoto. Hashimoto creates innumerable brightly colored, intricately patterned Japanese rice paper “kites” that he coalesces into multi-layered, visually astounding compositions.

In the middle gallery, a cloud-like canopy of resin kites suspended from the ceiling shifts between front-facing and lateral viewpoints. This immersive installation intersperses monochrome white, black, red, and yellow geometric tiles with bold and intricate multi-colored patterns, providing an engrossing and complex viewing experience. Resin, a recent addition to Hashimoto’s oeuvre, retains the ephemeral lightness of the artist’s signature rice paper medium but adds a density and luster akin to encaustic or stained glass. Beyond the hanging installation, “The Dark Isn't The Thing To Worry About” presents six new paper kite wall works that range from smaller, graphic pieces to a 6.5 x 6 foot kite sculpture with swirling organic lines cut by bold lines and a labyrinthine expanse of yellow. The latticed dispersion of colors and geometric forms in each work the captures the multi-dimensional, magical experience of Hashimoto’s installations.

"The Dark Isn't The Thing To Worry About” builds upon the artist’s concern with mankind’s digital and ecological intrusions into the natural world and his research into post-humanist and Anthropocene theories. Hashimoto reverberates the fragmentation of our own digital world and its impact on perception through an amalgam of intricate, inventive designs drawn into focus and fractured by sharp, graphic lines. “The Dark Isn’t The Thing To Worry About” balances the natural and manufactured, analog and digital, monochrome and intricately patterned, echoing the multi-fold contemporary human experience.

------

Jacob Hashimoto (b. 1973, Greeley, Colorado) received his BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently lives and works in New York. In 2017 Jacob Hashimoto had a survey of his installations at the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art in Turku, Finland, and previous solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MoCA) Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO) in Rome, Italy; Nevada Art Museum in Reno, Nevada; Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, Italy; the Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden; Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice, Italy; Rice University Art Gallery in Houston, Texas; and a site-specific installation at Schauwerk Sindelfingen, The Peter Schaufler Foundation in Sindelfingen, Germany.