Jacob Hashimoto's IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair Online Picks
"For me, the greatest moments at the IFPDA Print Fair always come as a surprise. The discovery of a new artist, the rediscovery of an old passion, seeing work by friends, teachers, and heroes."
IFPDA Executive Director Jenny Gibbs invited artist Jacob Hashimoto to curate a list of picks from the IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair.
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For me, the greatest moments at the IFPDA Print Fair always come as a surprise. The discovery of a new artist, the rediscovery of an old passion, seeing work by friends, teachers, and heroes. It’s what makes the print fair such a wonderful event. Funny enough, seeing it online today allowed me to see works in a very different and in some ways more comprehensive way. Of course, so much of the joy in printmaking is the physicality of these incredible objects and that is diminished through the screen — but, I feel like I was able to spend more time thinking and looking at these images with a level of concentration that I rarely have in person. So, this has been interesting. There’s no system here. Here we are in order of discovery:It’s always good to find works and artists that you don’t know much about and I didn’t know much about Ibrahim El-Salahi’s work until colliding with this image at Paragon. Clearly, I initially responded to the colors, composition, and El-Salahi’s clever use of materials. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The rest of this particular body of work is amazing and the long creative and political arc of his life is an inspiration.
I’ve long been impressed with Rashid Johnson’s work and I’m always so impressed with his ability to humanize politics and personal narratives. Johnson’s rare ability to navigate the complex, volatile landscape of race, identity, humanity, and frailty is always worth a long, thoughtful look.
How we read Tacita Dean’s images of LA skyscapes have changed and probably not for the better. The “LA Exuberance” images seem to be portraits of a lost world. Both touching and sad, they are illustrations of how art lives in the world and meaning isn’t static.
Soledad Salamé’s work has always drawn us into a deeper discussion about our place in the world and our impact on the environment. These days, in our screen-filtered lives through which we watch the seas roil and the forest burn, these images from 2011 seem ever so prescient. Would that we were all paying attention a decade ago.
It’s always amazing to run into a John McLaughlin artwork of any kind. He made relatively little work by today’s standards, but it’s all worth a good long look. Moments of peace and small gestures. I remember discovering his work for myself when I lived in Los Angeles in the 90’s and it forever changed my understanding of what was possible.
Derrick Adams is getting a lot of well-deserved love these days and I think that this self-portrait is just perfect. There is some great magic here, but not magical thinking. This print and the others from Tandem Press have a huge range and speak so smartly that it’s hard to know where to start praising them. I like the unicorn a lot though.
These Louise Bourgeois crochet prints from the ’90s are mind-blowing. Honestly, I don’t think the pictures quite do them justice. I had the chance to see the whole set in person several years ago and they are such great prints — clean, simple, essential, and masterfully made.
Maybe I’m thinking a bit about the environment these days, but I’m not alone. Agnes Denes has made work over the years that many of us are just starting to understand more seriously and finding works by her at the fair was such a nice surprise. This later print feels like some kind of fundamental decoder for her conceptual logic. It’s probably not. It’s curious to consider the art historical landscape that she’s navigated over her life. A landscape to which she has brought or created her own vantage.
Sarah Sze is generally just an amazing artist and this thing that she made with the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies is particularly fantastic. On a purely superficial level, I could just look at this for a long time, breaking my mind to reverse engineer how they did it. But, of course, it’s doing a lot more than just being cool
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Using sculpture, painting, and installation, Jacob Hashimoto creates complex worlds from a range of modular components: bamboo-and-paper kites, model boats, even astroturf-covered blocks. His accretive, layered compositions reference video games, virtual environments, and cosmology, while also remaining deeply rooted in art-historical traditions notably, landscape-based abstraction, modernism, and handcraft.
Jacob Hashimoto was born in Greeley, Colorado in 1973 and is a graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Ossining, New York. Hashimoto has been featured in museum exhibitions at MOCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, Schauwerk Sindlefingen in Germany, Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art in Finland, Galleria d’Arte Moderna “Achille Forti” in Italy, Museo di Storia Naturale in Italy, Site Santa Fe in New Mexico, Science Museum of Oklahoma and the Crow Museum of Asian Art in Texas. He has also had solo shows at Mary Boone Gallery in New York, Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, Studio la Città in Verona, Galerie Forsblom in Helsinki, Anglim Gilbert Gallery in San Francisco, and Makasiini Contemporary in Turku, among others. His work is in the collections of LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art, EMMA - Saastamoinen Foundation, Schauwerk Sindelfingen, The California Endowment, The Microsoft Art Collection, Avon Hospital Art Collection, Capitol One Collection, McDonald’s Corporation Collection, Fondation Carmignac, San Francisco’s Civic Art Collection and numerous other public collections.
