super-elastic collisions (origins, and distant derivations)
Rhona Hoffman Gallery 2012
Hashimoto has consistently created massive, space-altering installations throughout his career. Often employing colorful paper structures, he plays with alterations of space and our surrounding environment in his multi-layered and geometrically complex works, evoking the phenomenological effect of nature through elements of artifice. This exhibition includes two monumental installations that mark the beginning of a new body of work in Hashimoto’s career and are considered by the artist to be his most ambitious installations to date.
"super-elastic collisions and distant derivations,“ is an abstraction of interwoven trees which emerge from the room center and envelop the viewer under arcs of maple cubes. Simultaneously portraying a weightlessness cloud and arching tree limbs the installation explores the idea of viewing nature as a digital and analogue landscape, further emphasizing the artists’ fascination with our environment and the various portrayals and simplifications of the elements that define it. Hashimoto creates artworks that consumes us, yet expose the process of their creation and essential origin-complex masses comprised of fundamental objects.
"Gas Giant" is the latest chapter of Hashimoto’s recent large-scale kite installations, and is composed of cube-shaped kites in colorful groupings that hang from the ceiling of the large gallery space. Nature is alluded to in this work as well as a drifting, gravity-less cloud of land mixes with imagery of sky. Simultaneously controlled yet loose, violent yet stayed, the installation conveys the powerful and overwhelming sensation of watching a natural phenomenon while simultaneously illustrating the subjective nature of memory and the elements which conjure it.
