barbara hashimoto | retrospective exhibition

BARBARA HASHIMOTO RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION
17 Years of Sculpture, Installation & Performance

Barbara Hashimoto, Village Hairdresser, ceramic ,book, encaustic, graphite (1999)
photo credit: Eric Young Smith

This solo exhibition is an overview of the artist’s body of work since her first exhibition in Tokyo in 1991. A survey of Hashimoto’s 17-year exploration into the book form is presented in the gallery’s front space while distillations of four of her installation/performance works, along with a documentary video on her experience as an apprentice in Japan, are presented in the gallery’s anterior space.

The artist resided in Japan from 1987 to1995, in Los Angeles from 1996 to 2006, and has been in Chicago since 2007. Each locale has profoundly influenced her work. In Japan she split her time between apprentice duties in the countryside and an ex-pat’s life in Tokyo. Her early work in Japan dealt with issues of cultural dissonance, censorship, and feminism. In Los Angeles she had a diligent and solitary studio practice and engaged in the art community, associating and collaborating with other artists. In addition to her research-based and conceptually-driven sculptural book series, she became known for her multi-media installations/performances during this period. In Chicago she is Artist-in-Residence at BauerLatoza Studio, a multidisciplinary architecture firm. Charged with engaging the firm’s staff in creative projects, her initial work there has been concerned with the environment and building community.

Although much of the artist’s work is situated throughout the world in public and private collections, a formative body was available locally for this exhibition. Selections for this exhibition were made to create a spare and elegant presentation of the artist’s on-going, passionate engagement with theme, process, and materiality.

This Yale-educated artist has exhibited throughout the United States, Japan, and the Middle East and is in more than 250 public and private collections including The Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American Art, The Museum of Arts and Design , The National Museum of Women in the Arts, and The Art Institute of Chicago (Joan Flasch Collection).

The foundation of her work is based in practice and repetition, this influenced by her formative training in dance and her years as an artist’s apprentice and tea ceremony student in Japan. Hashimoto was a live-in apprentice for two years to Junko Yamada (Saitama, Japan) and Artist-in-Residence under “Intangible Cultural Asset”, Minoru Fujimori (Shikoku, Japan). She studied dance with Merc Cunningham, Meredith Monk and Laura Dean in New York in the 1970’s and butoh with Iwani Masaki in Tokyo in the 1980’s.