Jacob Hashimoto

Not After a Million Years

Talley Dunn Gallery
October 5, 2024 – January 18, 2025

Talley Dunn Gallery is honored to announce Sun Dogs, a solo exhibition of acclaimed Houston-based artist Natasha Bowdoin. Renowned for her sprawling and lush collage-based works and installations teeming with natural abundance, Bowdoin presents her most recent captivating wall-mounted works in this newest exhibition at the gallery. The artist paints with bright primary colors and soft pastels on cut wood to create clustered and cascading forms of vivacious floral and vine-like vegetation that, despite their earthly roots, are also evocative of the celestial. The exhibition’s title, Sun Dogs, references the visual phenomenon of spots of bright light that appear next to the Sun. These “mock” suns are the result of sunlight refracting off atmospheric ice crystals. Etymologically deriving from ancient mythologies, sun dogs came to be called as such as they were seen as heavenly dogs or wolves. Like sun dogs, Bowdoin’s works engage with the natural world not only as it exists, but also in the various ways it is imagined. Finding splendor in the liminal spaces between fact and fiction, science and affect, and what is animate and inanimate; Bowdoin’s thriving and generative forms call us to reconsider our relationships to nature in new lights.

This exhibition features works from a new series Posy where layers of individually cut pieces of painted wood are dynamically arranged in organically unfurling assemblages. The depth and intricacy of these works lend them a sculptural quality that is mesmerizingly immersive, inviting viewers to pause and let their eyes joyously wander. Along with works from the Posy series, the exhibition also features two larger framed works Sun Garden and Thicket. Reminiscent of multivalent points in time and space, ranging from centuries-old botanical illustrations to retro design aesthetics of the 1980s, all of Bowdoin’s works capture the lively and transformative power of nature that disavows easy classification, and compels viewers to question how we make sense of ourselves and the world around us.

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. His work is in the collections of LACMA – Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; EMMA – Saastamoinen Foundation, Schauwerk Sindelfingen; The California Endowment; Tacoma Art Museum, Washington; Cornell Tech Art, New York; Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State, as well as many others.