Briefly

“skip skitter start trip vault bounce - and other attempts at flight”
At the Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Through Dec. 23

Earthbound might be the worst description of Jacob Hashimoto: his installations share not only a spacious grandeur, but also a celestial lightness. “skip skitter start trip vault bounce—and other attempts at flight,” currently on view at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, and tailor-made for the site, inhabits and explores its space from an elegant, distinctly Eastern angle. From the ceiling dangles the fluttering centerpiece, an ethereal flock of white “kites” painstakingly fashioned from silk and bamboo, hovering over gallerygoers like a lustrous cloud. Equally striking work adorns the walls: papery rainbow mosaics that unite origami and quilt-making in a hushed tribute to Hashimoto’s dual heritage.

“On the Scene”
At the Art Institute of Chicago
Through Jan. 28

The Art Institute’s new “On the Scene” gathers the work of three local photographers—Jessica Rowe, Jason Salavon and Brian Ulrich—into their own solo shows. In an eerie excavation of red-state memories, interiors become family scrapbooks in Rowe's work, while clothes become ciphers that simultaneously cloak and illuminate their owner’s lives. Ulrich searches the same corners of the country. His photographs reprove the Republican equation of patriotism with consumerism, slyly documenting the self-annihilating monotony and gluttony behind the ritual of shopping. Probing the borders of the medium itself, Salavon’s “photographs” take wildly diverse forms: from concentric, rust-hued circles to snaking blocks of color. These geometries are startingly precise. Yielded by intricate mathematical averaging—quite literally abstracting beauty from mountains of everyday ephemera—these computer-aided objets d'art mold the ordinary into the transcendent.