Susanna Gold & Unique Photo announce the U.S. debut of artist Yasuomi Hashimura with Future Déjà Vu, a solo exhibition in the Unique Photo galleries in Old City, Philadelphia. Hashimura’s ongoing series features abstracted images of historic sculpture, architecture, and landscape from Paris, Rome, and the artist's native Japan. Hashimura creates each photo-based print as a unique work of art, through a process in which he combines darkroom printing with calligraphic brushwork. 

Scholars have referred to this blend of painting techniques and photographic methods as "Hashigraphy," a highly personalized form of painting in the darkroom. Working with photographic emulsion as his medium, Hashimura layers gestural strokes and drips that both obscure and emphasize portions of the photographic image, removing it from the particulars of time and space. By re-imagining ancient artifacts, architectures, and traditional culture according to his own contemporary vision, Hashimura modernizes the historic in his Future Déjà Vu series, encouraging the viewer to suspend traditional notions of past and present, memory and history, loss and preservation. 

Hashimura quotes Daisetsu T. Suzuki, a Japanese scholar who wrote extensively on Zen and Buddhism: "Eternity is the Absolute present." The concept of the artist’s Future Déjà Vu series is, in essence, a kind of eternal truth, where the past, present, and future are all connected. Hashimura demonstrates this concept by taking a historic subject (architecture, sculpture, or monument), re-producing it in the present as a contemporary work of art, but in such a way that it appears aged and historic itself, as if the viewer is looking back at the contemporary artwork from some future point in time as an artifact of the past. 

Yasuomi Hashimura (b. 1945, Ibaraki City, Osaka, Japan) lives and works in New York City. He has had solo exhibitions in Tokyo at the National Museum of Western Art; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Seibu Yurakucho Art Forum; and Mikimoto Gallery, , Ginza. He has also exhibited his work in group exhibitions and delivered lectures in Taiwan, Brazil, and the U.S. 

In addition to the Opening Reception on Sept. 9, 5-7pm, special events during the exhibition include:

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• 20/20 Photo Festival Gallery Walk-through on Sat, Sept. 25, 1-2pm
   

• Philadelphia Open Studio Tour (POST) on Sat, Oct. 16, 12-6pm

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• ONLINE Philadelphia Open Studio Tour (POST) on Wed, Oct. 20, 5-8pm EDT

All events are free and open to the public. Elevator accessible.

Curator appointments are advised but not required: 610-368-6927 or susanna@susannaWgold.com