Jacob Hashimoto: Skip Skitter Trip Vault Bounce and Other Attempts at Flight
Rhona Hoffman Gallery
November 18 to December 23, 2005

Kites carry great metaphoric potential. In many ways, they are free -- they can flip and skip in the whimsy of the breeze. Yet at the same time, they remain restricted, held firm by the person holding the string. This quality of a kite, being an entity that is both free and restricted, makes them potent vehicles for ideas ranging from art’s once pointed ambition of transcendence to kite flying’s ability to serve as a form collective social release in some cultures. The tension lying between restriction and flight seemed to be the dominate message of Jacob Hashimoto’s exhibition last fall at Rhona Hoffman.

Hashimoto’s kites try, often extravagantly, to break free, but never truly fly. Hence Hasimoto’s title for the show: Skip Skitter Trip Vault Bounce and Other Attempts at Flight. This expression of futility owes quite a bit to Icarus. The sculptural installations start out as hopeful attempts at flight, hundreds of light wood frames covered in semitranslucent Japanese paper hint that if outdoors, they may transported skyward with the lightest breeze. One is reminded of Has Haake’s Blue Sail, 1964, a floating sculpture which came at a time when art making was moving away from the goal of leaving the earth for higher planes of experience to merely leaving the gallery in search of actual experience itself. Hashimoto’s kites, like Haake’s work, congeal into hovering wonderlands of landscape, somewhere between two dimensions and three, leaving the ground yet ultimately unable to make it out of the systems which contain them.

Hashimoto’s work, despite its illusions of levity and release, is held tight between metal support systems and fastened by fishing wire. But even though critics use phrases like buoyant and weightless to describe Hashimoto’s work, I would garner together a different group of adjectives: tied down, controlled, bound, claustrophobic. Even flight at its most triumphant, such as displayed in the large gallery filling piece Super Abundant Atmosphere, 2005, must come down on top of the viewer like a tight cave. Other of Hashimoto’s installations read like hives or lily pad clusters rather than fluting skyward and threatening to break out of the gallery.

The restricted activities of Hashimoto’s work, when taken with his use of solid colorful shapes on his kites, force the metaphor of the installation into the social realm, the world of kite flying as leisure during political and religious holidays in countries like Japan. Often his kites carry the colors and shape of flags as kites often do in the festivals of Asia. Hashimoto wants to extend the metaphor of his work to include the symbolic reasons why we fly kites in general, our ambitions to fly and the strings that won’t allow us to do so.

In the United States, perhaps we have difficulty understanding kites as a potential social metaphor. In this country, kite flying is restricted to the diversions of children. We have kite flying societies, but generally one regards such groups in much the same way one thinks about electronic car societies or science fiction conventions, they are youthful but only in a nostalgic, creepy adult sort of way. Americans have little respect for transformative potential of kites. We tend to tell people to “Go fly a kite” when we are upset and want them to leave. Therefore we might be tempted to think that Hashimoto’s work exists in a temporary, childish way.

Kites have a different status, however, in other nations, and it is in this sensibility that Hashimoto finds deeper meaning for his work. For example, in Pakistan kites have a celebratory or pageant effect; they are taken out for a variety of occasions from religious to political holidays. The hobby bridges across age barriers, kite designs become willfully elaborate, and often you often see photographs of adults handling many strings at once watching their kites dip and dive, jump and spring across the sky. Kites are a form of collective release in these countries, they allow one to fuse with natural currents and come to a sort of playful, nonthreatening equilibrium.

Hashimoto notices in his work that any cultural bearing that kites have also carry a cultural and political dimension. As the delicate rice paper frames stand suspended or hang out from the wall, the solid graphic symbols, not quite recognizable, bring the viewer quietly into a world where kites can serve as release from political tyranny or the day to day rigor of life. Hashimoto tries to weave his formal concerns with the visual social reality around him. In this pursuit, he is successful. While the sculptures serve as a quite brilliant reflection of sculpture and painting, they also present a festive quality of a pageant. When the kites form a cave, somewhere between flight and enclosure, they call attention to the limits of the room, serving as passages out of the room and as chains to stay in the room. Such limits are constantly imposed by society as well and the Hashimoto teaches us this beautiful lesson.


Images Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago