Jacob Hashimoto, Armada

True to his project's title, invoking lightness and lift, the Japanese-American artist invades the space of Studio la Città.

Public art is not necessarily to be found only outside the usual elite venues of galleries, museums, churches, and private homes. Yet nor is it always to be discovered in open-air installations or in public squares. Because genuine public art is, of course, both public and extremely private and can be installed anywhere.

A prospective city councillor for Merseyside has recently said that Antony Gormley's "Iron Men", disseminated along a polluted stretch of the Irish Sea, should be destroyed. The email response of the general public (not the "art" public) has been vigorous to say the least. "This is our heritage"; "It's fascinating to see how the sea, sand and weather—and also to some extent, the visitors!—interact with them over time"; "They are part of the community now". A moving testimony to the intimate yet public impact of some contemporary art.
Work in progress. Photo Michele Sereni.
Work in progress. Photo Michele Sereni.
Although Jacob Hashimoto often works on a small scale, like Gormley he mainly works in expansive public contexts, while conveying an intimacy that allows the work to be both "a part of the community" and part of individual experience. And this latest work by him is emblematic in this regard.

At first sight it is, of course, abstract, though the usual figurative metaphors for describing it come to mind: cloudbanks, waves, billowing sails. And yet, however tiny, the individual elements are there to see and recognize. In this case they are miniscule boats. And once the characteristic beauty of Hashimoto's work has been digested, not as an "extra" but as an inherent part of its meaning, so these other thoughts and emotions also present themselves. Here we are enveloped by these boats breasting the invisible sea around us: these are old and persistent emotions, all the more potent because here they are so airily and lightly expressed.
Work in progress. Photo Michele Sereni.
Work in progress. Photo Michele Sereni.
During the last World War a bomb dropped near one of the most beautiful buildings in Italy: Palazzo Canossa, Verona. A frescoed ceiling by Tiepolo was reduced to thousands of fragments. I doubt that these individual pieces, seen alone, could give any idea of the frescoed ceiling now only to be seen in photographs. Nor could the individual boats of Hashimoto's grand work. But there is a correspondence between his ethereal, intimate, public art and that of Tiepolo. There is no reason to apologize for what is, after all, simply an analogy but, I believe, a highly suggestive and therefore useful one. The eighteenth century has breezed into the twenty-first.
Michael Haggerty

May 14–September 17 2011
Jacob Hashimoto. Armada
Studio la Città, Verona (Italy)
Although Jacob Hashimoto often works on a small scale, like Gormley he mainly works in expansive public contexts, while conveying an intimacy that allows the work to be both 'a part of the community' and part of individual experience.

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