The exhibition, organized by Studio la Città – Verona and curated by Marco Meneguzzo, is a large-scale site-specific installation that the artist has conceived for interaction with the rooms of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice; its aim is to create an unmediated relationship with the viewer.

The work of Jacob Hashimoto (1973, Greeley, Colorado, U.S.A.) is characterized by the use of certain stylistic elements borrowed from Japanese culture, such as kites made from bamboo and paper; Jacob reassembles these to build huge installations and interactive sculptural forms that literally invade the exhibition area.

 The visual complexity of his work, together with the lightness of his materials, accompany the visitors along their sensorial itinerary, one in which space-time coordinates are lost and where the visitors are enveloped in a feeling of wonder and amazement.

Hashimoto’s installations are, at one and the same time, a tangible exploration of the fascinating possible intersections between painting and sculpture, figuration and ab- straction, nature and artifice.

The artist has said, “There is a playful component in my work. The stylistic elements that I use have something to do with a general feeling of nostalgia rather than any direct relationship to my origins. Kites are about a feeling for childhood and a relationship to nature rather than a particular Japanese tradition”. GAS GIANT consists of about 10,000 bamboo and paper kites handmade by the ar tist; these will be the visitors’ companion from the central room to the top floor. Here the work condenses and is transformed into a thick cloud that invades and saturates the space.

Curator Marco Meneguzzo describes GAS GIANT as “a kind of strange landscape. We do not know if it is natural, vegetable or human because the sense of dispersion – that is, the general unpredictability of its dissemination – is superior to that of the artist’s rational ordering. The immediate visual and emotive outcome suggests a kind of “natural self-disposition” of the elements, one whose compositional heart we must discover, as when we analyze a complete ecosystem while living inside it. So this is why the work becomes a grandiose metaphor for every type of “system” in which each individual element, even if only because it is nearby, influences the other in building a harmony. Each building, each composition, even the most unlikely or dangerous, has a design, an overall vision, that in embryo is already to be found in its smallest constitutive elements, even if the “bricks” in this case are kites”.