Literature

Jacob Hashimoto has produced four woodblock relief projects with Durham Press: Love’s Great Mystery, Ontological and Absolute; The Hashimoto Index I; and the diptych The Blurred, Mystical Affirmation of the Universe and The Calamitous, yet Normal Circumstance of the Universe. Together with Lemmata, the portfolio of etchings that Hashimoto completed at Durham Press in 2015, these new projects offer a sequential view of the artist’s process, and continue to investigate topics such as the interactions between the handmade and the mechanized, as well as those between natural, digital, and personal landscapes.

While the Lemmata present spare, black-and-white images of that resemble the diagrams the artist formulates in advance of producing a kite-based wall works, these new projects evoke the kites themselves. Love’s Great Mystery, Ontological and Absolute is a structured, grid-like composition measuring 25 3/4 x 38 3/4 inches. Hashimoto positioned multicolor relief-printed “kites” within a blue wood-grain background—a self-referential nod to the production process of the woodblocks where multiple blocks for each kite are created using a CNC (computer numerical control) router. For this work, the artist placed the kites back into the negative spaces of the plywood sheet from which they were cut, allowing the precise, programmed patterns and shapes of the kites to contrast with the natural texture of the plywood.

The Hashimoto Index I comprises ninety-six relief prints, each measuring 7 5/8 inches squared and featuring a circular kite at the center. Like with his installations and wall works, this catalog of variously patterned and colored shapes can be transformed into various innumerable compositions, either by the artist or the viewer. Hashimoto used the Index as components for the pair The Blurred, Mystical Affirmation of the Universe and The Calamitous, yet Normal Circumstance of the Universe, each 39 x 36 inches. Both works feature clusters of kites that seem to float across the white paper like clouds or smokestacks. Each kite is semi-transparent so that the pattern and structure of those printed behind it remains visible, compounding several visual layers and creating contours akin to topography. These new projects delve further into Hashimoto’s longstanding interest in landscape, contemplating how our tools for organizing and mapping space can yield spontaneous and unexpected results when filtered through the lens of individual experiences.