Fondazione Querini Stampalia
Jacob HasHimoto: Gas Giant
A project organized by Studio la Città – Verona
Curated by Marco Meneguzzo
Venice, Fondazione Querini Stampalia
29 May 2013 – 1 September 2013
www.jacobhashimotovenice.com
Press preview
28 May 2013, from 10 AM to 6 PM
From May 29 to May 31, 2013, free entry for press and professionals
Opening reception
28 May 2013, from 6 PM
Venice, 27 May 2013
Jacob HasHimoto: Gas Giant will be opening to the public on 29 may 2013. organized by studio la città – Verona and curated by marco meneguzzo, it will be installed on the fourth floor of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, in an area restructured by architect Mario Botta; the show will remain open to the public until 1 september 2013, from tuesday to sunday, 10 am to 6 pm.
Gas GiaNt is a large-scale site-specific installation that the artist has conceived for interaction with the rooms of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice; its aim is to create an unmediated relationship with the viewer.
The work of Jacob Hashimoto (1973, Greeley, Colorado, U.S.A.) is characterized by the use of certain stylistic elements borrowed from Japanese culture, such as kites made from bamboo and paper; Jacob reassembles these to build huge installations and interactive sculptural forms that literally invade the exhibition area. The visual complexity of his work, together with the lightness of his materials, accompany the visitors along their sensorial itinerary, one in which space-time coordinates are lost and where the visitors are enveloped in a feeling of wonder and amazement.
Hashimoto’s installations are, at one and the same time, a tangible exploration of the fascinating possible intersections between painting and sculpture, figuration and abstraction, nature and artifice. The artist has said, “There is a playful component in my work. The stylistic elements that I use have something to do with a general feeling of nostalgia rather than any direct relationship to my origins. Kites are about a feeling for childhood and a relationship to nature rather than a particular Japanese tradition”. After a long series of installations in museums and international exhibition spaces (among them the work superabundant atmosphere installed in Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, on the occasion of the show In-finitum, 2009), Jacob Hashimoto, concurrently with the 55th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, is now to fill the Fondazione Querini Stampalia’s Venetian building with a new installation.
Gas GiaNt consists of about 10,000 bamboo and paper kites handmade by the artist; these will be the visitors’ companion from the central room to the top floor. Here the work condenses and is transformed into a thick cloud that invades and saturates the space.
Curator Marco Meneguzzo describes Gas Giant as “a kind of strange landscape. We do not know if it is natural, vegetable or human because the sense of dispersion – that is, the general unpredictability of its dissemination – is superior to that of the artist’s rational ordering. The immediate visual and emotive outcome suggests a kind of “natural self-disposition” of the elements, one whose compositional heart we must discover, as when we analyze a complete ecosystem while living inside it.
So this is why the work becomes a grandiose metaphor for every type of “system” in which each individual element, even if only because it is nearby, influences the other in building a harmony. Each building, each composition, even the most unlikely or dangerous, has a design, an overall vision, that in embryo is already to be found in its smallest constitutive elements, even if the “bricks” in this case are kites”.
As the show’s title suggests, the giant size of the work, typical of Hashimoto’s art, dialogues with the extraordinary lightness and delicacy of the materials utilized and sparks off the first-hand participation of the visitors: they are immersed in the stillness, as well as the grandeur, of a setting that simulates an uncontaminated world that, however, does not exist.
White, the predominant colour of the about 10,000 kites that make up Gas GiaNt, is interrupted by coloured patterns and geometrical and plantlike motifs; these confer on the installation a movement that is both temporal and rhythmic. In his work, in fact, Hashimoto elaborates an increasingly new definition of space and time, and explores the dreamlike aspect of a nature that changes perspective and meaning in relation to an observation point, inducing the viewer to undergo instinctively a meditative experience of the work. As the artist says, “architecture is a basic aspect of my work. Often the work takes on a form as a result of the architecture that hosts it: the sculptural characteristics of the work depend on the space in which the work comes about. At other times, instead, it is the work that imposes itself on the space and completely transforms it. It is a process that undergoes continuous change and is the result of a continuous negotiation which, by its very nature, does not have a result that could have been foreseen. This is why the dialogue that comes about between the work, the space, and the viewer is a central point in my work.”
Not just the tension, but also the visual exuberance of Hashimoto’s work and its search for a precise luminous dimension – both literally and metaphorically – give it a poetic aspect, one that often cannot be defined precisely or stylistically pinpointed in the artist’s output. His works, in fact, are both architecture, given their precise three-dimensional structure, and painting, given the refined chromatic effects of the surface of the paper.
Jacob HasHimoto: Gas GiaNt is accompanied by the first monograph of the work of Jacob Hashimoto, edited by curator luca massimo barbero and published by marsilio editori. Special thanks to paper mill Gruppo Cordenons.
Concurrently with Jacob HasHimoto: Gas GiaNt in the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, Jacob Hashimoto will also be holding solo shows in studio la città – Verona (Foundational Work, 25.05.2013 – 31.08.2013); the Forsblom gallery, Finland (Armada, 17.05.2013 – 9.06.2013); the bildmuseet, umeå, sveden (Superabundant Atmosphere, 2.06.2013 – 13.10.2013); and in schauwerk sindelfingen, Germany (Sky Columns, 15.06.2013 – spring 2014).
For further information and requests for interviews:
tommaso speretta
tommasosperetta@gmail.com
+39 3479502563
marta Fraccarolo
ufficiostampa@studiolacitta.it
+39 045 597549
www.jacobhashimotovenice.com
studio la città – Verona
Lungadige Galtarossa, 21
37133 Verona - IT
Tel: +39 045 597549
Fax: +39 045 597028
www.studiolacitta.it
