BARBARA HASHIMOTO: White Trash & Junk Mail
On June 1, 2007 Barbara Hashimoto, Artist-in-Residence at the Chicago-based architecture firm BauerLatoza Studio, asked the sixteen staff members to set aside junk mail they received at the office address. For an entire year Hashimoto incorporated the daily hand-shredding of this unsolicited material into her studio practice. At the end of twelve months she had amassed more than 3,000 cubic feet of shredded material, constituting the amount of junk mail delivered by the U.S. Postal Service to this one small business.
The genesis of this project was inspired by a number of mind-boggling statistics: AMERICANS RECEIVE 77 BILLION PIECES OF JUNK MAIL ANNUALLY and THE AVERAGE AMERICAN WILL SPEND EIGHT MONTHS OF HIS/HER LIFE HANDLING JUNK MAIL. Statistics like these have taken hold of the artist both visually and physically.
Hashimoto’s labor-intensive yet intimate process has inspired a series of sculptures, installations, performances, and collaborations presented in Los Angeles and Chicago. Now under the sponsorship of the Chicago Arts District and Podmarjersky, Inc., BARBARA HASHIMOTO: White Trash & Junk Mail is envisioned as an evolving presentation with the year-long shredded collection changing, sometimes on a weekly basis. The public is encouraged to view this process anytime through the 45-foot floor-to-ceiling storefront windows. In the evenings the exhibition will be lit for viewing.
EXHIBITION SCHEDULE:
JUNK MAIL LANDSCAPES
July 11 – September 13
Guest Artist | Michael Kozien | sound and video
JUNK MAIL INTERIORS
September 26 – October 25
38th Annual Pilsen East Artist’s Open House | September 26 – 28
JUNK MAIL 101
November 1 – 31
Guest Artist | R. O’Donnell | performance
JUNK MAIL CHRISTMAS
December 1 – 31
Reception | Friday, 6 – 10 PM | December 12
Barbara Hashimoto’s sculpture, installation, and performance work has been presented throughout the United States, Japan, Europe, and the Middle East. It 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).
Previously based in Tokyo and Los Angeles, Hashimoto relocated to Chicago in 2006 where she is Artist-in-Residence at BauerLatoza Studio, a multi-disciplinary architectural design firm. Educated at Yale, she was also apprentice to Junko Yamada (Saitama, Japan), and artist-in-residence under “Intangible Cultural Asset”, Minoru Fujimori (Shikoku, Japan) and at Umdang Ceramics (Dan Kwain, Thailand). She studied dance in New York with Merc Cunningham and Meredith Monk, and butoh with Iwani Masaki inTokyo.
Her most recent exhibitions include a seventeen years retrospective at Dubhe Carreño Gallery (reviewed by Alan Artner, Chicago Tribune, February 2008), and Reverse Trash Streams: The Junk Mail project at LA Contemporary (reviewed by Kirsten Swenson in Art in America, April 2008). Currently her work is on view at the Museum of Arts and Crafts, Itami, Japan in Your Documents Please, an exhibition which will later travel to Yokohama, Berlin, Budapest, Bratislava, and Guadalajara.
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* Photo: Archie FlorCruz, www.whateverland.com
July 27, 2008 at 10:35 pm
[...] BARBARA HASHIMOTO: White Trash & Junk MailIt 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 … [...]