A running start, the uplift of wind, the playful hover of tautly held paper: Even stiff-upper-lipped Mr. Banks in the 1964 children’s classic Mary Poppins can appreciate the unbridled joy of flying a kite.
Breezy day or not, visitors can capture some of that feeling this summer with Jacob Hashimoto‘s exhibition “a lowercase sky” at BCA Center in Burlington. In an installation of the same name that takes up the whole front gallery, the artist has used kite-making techniques from across the globe to create a veritable cloud of paper discs, stretching them across the space on a structure of bamboo rods and black string.
The installation is made of short spans of nine or so discs spaced at regular intervals, tied together to make long trails that weave above, below and across each other, all strung from the gallery walls and ceiling. Most are white; a few are elaborately patterned, solid black or painted blue with puffy white clouds. The Ossining, N.Y., artist and his assistant, Derek Zeitel, spent four full days creating the site-specific sculpture in the gallery, according to BCA curator and director of exhibitions Heather Ferrell.
While airy and spacious, the installation gives the gallery architectural nooks and crannies, with some areas low to the ground and others seeming to stretch higher than usual. Visitors can stand back to observe the whole or get lost in a visual flurry of activity. Ducking underneath one section to pop up in another is like getting lost in a next-level cat’s cradle.
It’s a temporal experience as much as a spatial one. The repeating forms seem to stutter across the air, as though they were individual frames from a movie or video game, seen simultaneously. The effect is a little like moving in bullet time.
Past the installation, a few sculptural reliefs offer a more ordered version of the kitelike constructions. Works such as “Neutron Star” and “Prying Into the Secrets of the Sky” stack differently sized discs in front of each other, affixed with string to pegs sticking out from the wall. In both pieces, Hashimoto paints dynamic, abstract compositions across the discs in black and white or color. Viewed from the front, they’re coherent; a shift in perspective to one side or the other seems to make them dissolve into a field of floating bubbles.
Hashimoto also gives viewers a visual index with a series of 192 9-by-9-inch framed prints, presented in a grid across one entire gallery wall and around a corner. Each print pictures a circle divided into four sections — the same format as the discs stretched over bamboo. But every circle is unique, sporting brightly colored patterns or symbols, creating an iconographic legend with no key. Some are swirling and romantic, others bold and geometric. Looking at one leads to discovering another, each more intriguing than the last.
While there may well be a meaning attached to each motif, that’s neither presented nor necessary for understanding the work. Everything in the exhibition instead encourages curiosity and exploration. It invites viewers to imagine themselves soaring up through the atmosphere — up where the air is clear.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Let’s Go Fly a Kite: Jacob Hashimoto’s Airy Installation at BCA Center”
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2025.
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