Installation review: The Other Sun by Jacob Hashimoto at the Ronchini Gallery

Sometimes, entering the gallery, visitors not only witness the works of art but can also step into one. This is the case with an installation The Other Sun by Jacob Hashimoto, which occupies the entire interior of the Ronchini Gallery, London Mayfair, where thousands of paper, kite-like structures create an imaginary landscape.

The New York-based artist, Jacob Hashimoto (born 1973) uses traditional kite-making techniques to create single, site-specific installations, which comprises his fascination with painting, sculpture, abstraction and landscape. Although the individual elements, made out of paper and bamboo frames, are small and delicate the multiplication of repetitive structures hanging from the ceiling creates a monumental piece. The structures cascade, overlap and create sculptural clouds and stalagmites. The show of transparencies, foregrounds and backgrounds changes while spectators move along and look in between the layers of individual elements, which – abstract themselves – sum up into an interactive, artistic landscape, as pixels in images create the representation. Being inside this installation is an investigation of basic artistic elements, which reveal their nature zoomed up like cells under a microscope.

His Japanese descent causes Hashimoto’s work to embody the features of European and American abstraction and pattern design as well as of traditional Eastern craftsmanship and art.  He does not copy nature, but emulates it. The Other Sun, made of paper and cane, is a demonstration an instantiation of a star flaring-up and a creation of new, autonomous universe in the interior of an art gallery.

                      Agata Gajda

Jacob Hashimoto The Other Sun is on from 29^th July to 28^th August 2012, at the Ronchini Gallery, 22 Dering Street, London, W1S 1AN, Mon-Sat 10am-6pm.

For more information visit the Ronchini Gallery online and Jacob Hashimoto