Hashimoto is a multidisciplinary artist best known for his utopian installations representing collaboration, possibility, and play. His art is like life—a collaborative adventure that brings moments of creations together while maintaining fleeting and transient aspects. The subsequent interaction creates something solid and monumental. At the end of their residency, the individual pieces are packed up to be used again elsewhere.

Hashimoto hires massive amounts of assistants to create hundreds of thousands of “kites”. The artist considers them marks of optimism and play. The assistants are given full rein to create the kites anyway they wish. Listening for instructions from his intuition, Hashimoto, then takes each individual kite and places it in situ to form large interactive installations like Gas Giant for the 56^th Venice Biennale.

The final messages are created on the fly and left for the audience to interpret based on their individual experiences. A Zen like quietude saturates the idyllic atmosphere and seems to ask for Universal thinking. Perhaps this form of work represents the innate creations of children before school systems tell them “The rules of art”.

Each time he builds a new environment, as in Nuvole, his only limiting factor is the architecture itself. Never Comes Tomorrow was shown at the Studio La Citta in Milan, Italy, in 2015 and shown again on Governors Island in New York in 2019. The site-specific installation was centered by a steel filigree funnel partially covered by leaded glass–digital pixels, if you will. This interactive exhibition allowed for the allusion of our immersible atmosphere. To walk around and through space, the visitor explores from his own perspective, creating an intensely personal experience filled with color and rustling.

In Armada, we find the kites replaced by 724 wooden sailboats floating on invisible tension. The boats like the kites harness the wind physically and metaphorically reminding us of the constant flux we live in as we try to find balance in flow.

Working with printmaking allows Hashimoto to work in another type of layered environment with no gravity, no engineering, and no physics. The tumbling playfulness captured in his prints, Tiny Rooms and Tender Promises and The Necessary Invention of the Mind, X, captures this process. There are often more than sixty color layers to run through hydraulic presses on every mono print. Both layered processes require hands on experience and staying focused in the moment and listening to intuition to make changes requiring attention.

Hashimoto wants to remind new artists that creating art is also a collaborative venture. We cannot champion ideas in our studio, in a vacuum. It is our job to get our creations to the public by finding our own way into the world by seeking out alliances.

To see more of Hashimoto’s work, visit his website. Or visit his galleries: Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Miles McEnery Gallery, Ronchini Gallery, and Elizabeth Leach Gallery.

 

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