"The End of Utopia" - Jacob Hashimoto

Jacob Hashimoto and Emil Lukas, two internationally recognized American artists, have been invited by Studio la Città Gallery to stage a site-specific show in Palazzo Flangini reflecting on "The End of Utopia."
As we move deeper into the Anthropocene, the cost of our ascendancy is becoming clear.
Decades of environmental exploitation have left us perilously balanced and wavering on every side: political, social, economic, natural, technological, and ecological. As many observers of the Anthropocene have noted with apt unease, humanity itself has increasingly become the
perpetrator, rather than victim, of planetary chaos. In the midst of these conditions, Hashimoto and Lukas’s work addresses a question of newfound relevance: If art is arguably the interpolation of manmade schema onto nature - humankind’s order upon primordial chaos -
then how does art’s meaning mutate, as we realize that the infrastructures, systems, and algorithms all originally designed by humans to bring utopia within reach, are in fact dooming its very viability?
Upon entering Palazzo Flangini’s seventeenth-century ground-floor space, visitors encounter an immense, floating, site-specific sculpture by Jacob Hashimoto, comprising 8500 black bamboo-and-paper kites suspended from the ceiling and assembled into a spectacular, roiling cloud that crests overhead.
This sculpture, according to the artist, is intended to be one of weight, not light. Forgoing his usual visual vocabulary of highly iconicized landscape elements, geometries, and vivid colors, Hashimoto has instead created a monochromatic piece using black, 9” kite-like discs. Upon close examination, the ellipsoidal surfaces reveal traces of barely perceptible stars, screenprinted
in ink that has become ghostly and indistinct after seeping into the work’s black backgrounds. Emerging quietly in light, these stars-which suggest elements of flags and firmament alike-evoke art’s history of multifariously addressing both the blunt banners of
politics, and the celestial realms that transcend them.