Jacob Hashimoto’s eighth solo exhibition at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Fables, features wall-mounted sculptural works constructed in the artist’s signature style using rice paper and bamboo “kites,” often complicated in their construction and always beautiful. The exhibition’s title pertains to the visual stories and histories Hashimoto’s sculptures pay tribute to, referencing movements such as 1960s West Coast Hard-edge painting — a response to the more gestural Abstract Expressionism; Minimalism; and the Japanese handicraft tradition.

Hundreds of individually collaged disks and rectilinear shapes — their faces often populated with geometric patterning, floral and celestial imagery, or monochrome surfaces — unite to form versatile compositions that can be read as landscapes (as is the case in The Endless Field and Groundwater), Modernist paintings, or abstracted renditions of the sublime. Each artwork is composed of six layers of strung kites of varying dimensions, their component parts coalescing to create a pixelated setting. The sculptures encourage movement, and each time a viewer shifts their body or eyes an alternate grouping of the patterned kites reveals itself.

The majority of the works in Fables are intimately scaled, their proportions being noteworthy when compared to the more sizable wall works and vast suspended installations Hashimoto is known for. Rather, these compact and cosmic vignettes — all having the word Moon in their title — invite meditative looking. Akin to past bodies of work, the complex compositions that comprise Fables reference cosmology, video games, virtual environments, as well as various art historical traditions, while concurrently possessing more transcendental and spiritual qualities. 

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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.