Artist Barbara Hashimoto and Director R. O’Donnell tape junk mail confessions
BARBARA HASHIMOTO: Junk Mail will hold a special reception on Friday, September 12 from 6 to 10 PM at 2003 South Halsted Street, Chicago. The event is held in conjunction with the Chicago Arts District’s 2nd Friday Gallery Walk. Throughout the evening, exhibition visitors will be invited to share their junk mail experiences, rants, and confessions. Their stories will be videotaped for presentation at the exhibition in November.
A new series of installations incorporating the Hashimoto’s year-long collection of junk mail will be on view along with the premiere her “Red Sea of Credit” an installation built from junk mail credit card solicitations. Michael Kozien’s suite of video and sound junk mail explorations will also be presented.
For an entire year artist Barbara Hashimoto collected and hand-shredded the junk mail that came to her studio address. At year’s end she had 3,000 cubic feet of shredded material. Her 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: Junk Mail presents an evolving schedule of shredded junk mail installations, associated works, visiting guest artists, and special events. The exhibition continues until December 31, 2008 and is open every Saturday from 12 noon to 4 PM, with receptions every 2nd Friday. The exhibition is installed and lit for public viewing through the 45-foot floor-to-ceiling storefront windows.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
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). Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art on Paper, Sculpture Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and more. 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). Her most recent exhibitions include a seventeen years retrospective at Dubhe Carreño Gallery (Chicago), and Reverse Trash Streams: The Junk Mail Project at LA Contemporary (Los Angeles). 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.
Richard O’Donnell is a playwright, producer, actor, and stand-up. He has worked and lived in New York and Chicago where he has written and performed for the stage and television. O’Donnell wrote the award-winning Off-Broadway show One & One, Radio City Music Hall’s A Manhattan Showboat, and co-founded the New Age Vaudeville theatre company, the New Variety cabaret, and the Fox TV show, R. Rated. O’Donnell is the Director of Junk Mail Confessions, which will be presented at the exhibition, BARBARA HASHIMOTO: Junk Mail in November 2008.
Michael Kozien is an interdisciplinary artist who merges video, sound, photography and animation to create ethereal installations that spotlight the misrepresentation of human value as filtered through contemporary media sources. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions at venues internationally, including Le Musee di-visioniste, Cologne, Germany, Thread-Waxing Space, NYC, and R.B. Stevenson Gallery, San Diego, CA. Michael holds a BFA in painting from Southern Illinois University and an MFA in digital media from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and The Chicago Tribune, and more.
R Productions 