Jacob Hashimoto is a New York-based artist who creates visual experiences in space through material and craft. His materials are simple—paper, wood, nylon strings, light, and shadow— yet together, they create ethereal experiences. The third and final installment of Hashimoto’s "Gas Giant" is on display now through June 8 at the MOCA Pacific Design Center. This marks Hashimoto’s first solo museum exhibition in California. 

These traditional kite-making materials and techniques create modern sculptural environments comprised of thousands of geometric translucent paper cutouts. He displays his two dimensional pieces in the gallery space to read as an extensive three-dimensional kaleidoscopic structure by hanging the pieces individually. Strings hold each side in an intricate gridded network suspended above.

The light and delicate characteristics of the translucent paper backed by structural wood and fine string is given another layer of depth with light and shadow. Hashimoto fills his space with hanging kites that are no larger than a letter-sized paper, which work together with the lights to create shadows. Never can one element of the exhibit standalone.

Additionally, Hashimoto knows the space and uses it so well.

The exhibit welcomes visitors through a threshold of high hanging hexagons in three different shades of yellow. Visitors move under the yellow floating canopy to the ground floor gallery, decorated by black and white kites. On the ground floor, visitors are exposed first hand to the material, craft, and intensive process of the artwork.

Concrete stairs lead visitors to the second floor gallery through a corridor with double height ceilings and white oval kites aggregated into the form of a cloud hanging from above. The installation flows into motion as visitors move underneath the colorless cloud, the language almost leading the visitors through the space up above onto another cloud. At the end of the stairs is a blank white wall. And to the left, another blank wall.

But to the right, a vast, almost spiritual paper landscape welcomes all.

Gas Giant is neither a flat painting nor a static volumetric sculpture. It is a series of artforms that sit inside a three-dimensional canvas and ultimately redefines the gallery space it fills. The artist’s hand-painted solid and patterned geometric kites depict abstract representations of nature, such as water, plants and clouds. The bold colors and patterns, and the execution and presentation of it as a collection of kites in one room is a delicate piece of architecture, an intricate hand-made landscape of organic flowing, emerging, and diverging architectural language. Each kite is so carefully placed, every kite so carefully composed within the larger composition. At one point, the cloud diverges as a sweeping line that reaches to the bottom of the hard wood floor; as a result the visitors are drawn to follow the same sweeping language throughout.

Hashimoto transforms conventional uses of material and technique, changing the way we see and experience them. Moreover, the exhibit is a revelation of process, handcrafted art and assembly in a culture where so many things are machine made, digital and consumed.

The Gas Giant has been previously exhibited as two other editions at Fondazione Querini Stampalia presented by Studio la Città in Venice, Italy in 2013 and at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago in 2013.

Hashimoto’s Gas Giant is on display through June 8 at the MOCA Pacific Design Center (8687 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood). Admission is free. For more information visit MOCA.org.

The blue prints and studies behind the Gas Giant exhibition are concurrently on view through April 5 at the Martha Otero Gallery (820 N. Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles).

You can contact Contributing Writer Lois Lee by email here.