The major focus of Hashimoto’s work for ten years (2006 - 2016) concerned the environmental issues of paper waste. Newly situated as artist-in-residence at a Chicago-based architecture firm, she was immediately intrigued by the abundance of junk mail the company received.
Her subsequent research uncovered some startling statistics, such as 100 million trees are cut down to produce junk mail annually, 44% of junk mail goes unopened into landfill, and the average American will spend 8 months of his life handling junk mail.[1] Determined to get a visual and physical perspective on these facts, Hashimoto collected and hand-shredded the junk mail delivered to her studio address for one year. This “Junk Mail Experiment” yielded 3,000-cubic feet of shredded junk mail which was the material foundation for an expansive body of work exhibited in Paris (Musée du Montparnasse), Berlin (Gallery UNO), Los Angeles (LA Contemporary), Chicago (in two solo exhibitions at Dubhe Carreño Gallery) and a one-year residency at an exhibition space in the Chicago Arts District and other venues including Northern Illinois University Museum of Art, and Governor State University.
The earliest phases of the project emphasized the environmental and personal burden of junk mail through large-scale installations and audience engagement. The inclusion of “junk mail facts” and her collaborations with environmental activists within the exhibition context provided an almost didactic approach. In contrast, the final years of the project provided a focus on the essence of the materials and the creation of discreet intimate objects from her shreds.
Hashimoto took her first action towards the conclusion of this project through the performative installation “Junk Mail Burning” (2012). In a bold move, she set fire to half of her collected shreds in a two-evening event reminiscent of Dondoyaki, the Ritual Burnings she experienced during her earlier tenure in Japan. The ash from her burnings were incorporated into ceramic glazes and drawing media.
She recycled some of her original junk mail shreds into 100’s of sheets of hand-made paper. And, in collaboration a group of MFA and PhD candidates from the University of Illinois created an art mail project, using 300 envelopes that were hand-cast from her original collection of shreds.
Concurrent to her Junk Mail Project, Hashimoto also worked with the white paper the architecture firm used and discarded during the course of business. Creating the installations such as “White Trash” and a photographic series, “On Becoming Tightly Bound,” which follows the transformation of a handful of shredded architecture plans. Since that time the architect industry has shifted from a print-intensive process to a digital one.
