<p>In her work on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, she explores the past and present through personal and cultural histories</p>

Janelle Zara

How LA sculptor Kelly Akashi measures time with crystal, mud, and fingernails

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<p>‘Our existence is precarious,’ the artist <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/17834/Kelly-Akashi" target="_blank">Kelly Akashi</a> tells me in her suburban Los Angeles studio. She is not speaking mystically or sentimentally but matter-of-factly: In the grand scheme of geological time, she explains, a human lifespan equates to the blink of an eye.</p>
<p>Akashi’s sculpture is fundamentally about different modes of time- and record-keeping and the ways that different materials (primarily cast metals and hand-blown glass, but recently also carved stone, rammed earth, and rocks) store memories on a biological, geological, and molecular level. These themes resound in ‘Formations’, a traveling survey exhibition of her work from the last decade that originated at the San José Museum of Art and is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego until February 18, 2024.</p>
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<p>Throughout the exhibition, Akashi’s hands appear in various materials and poses; cast in bronze and laid out on deceptively pillowy cushions of blown glass, or cast in lead crystal and poised gingerly on smooth but otherwise ordinary stones. In <em>Alternating Currents</em> (2020–21), bronze versions of her hands, with fingernails of dramatically different lengths and with various cracks and fissures, loosely clutch a double helix of colorless, vine-like glass. Since 2015, the artist has been casting her hands as they age, imperfections and all, ‘sort of like a mini timeline,’ she says. Fingernails, like hair, she adds, ‘are a material the body produces that offer a measurement of time.’</p>

<p>Akashi was born in Los Angeles in 1983. As an undergraduate student at Otis College of Art and Design, she specialized in photography, a medium that had seemingly lost its relevance by the time she graduated in 2006. ‘Everyone was so excited about the potential of digital that there was an assumption that darkrooms would be dead within 10 years,’ the artist explains. She briefly dabbled in painting as a potential alternative, but it was sculpture that presented many of the joys she initially found in the darkroom. The artist found that making molds and subsequently sculptures of living things – not only her hands, but also the occasional plant or frilly cluster of oyster mushrooms – was like taking a photograph, freezing a fleeting moment in the subject’s life. Plus, she adds, ‘mold-making is very much like making a negative into a print,’ with a similarly tactile procedural choreography.</p>

<p>In the 18 years since, Akashi has come to think of her artistic trajectory as a spiral rather than a straight line, tethered in orbit around the themes of lineage, memory, and accumulation, but perpetually expanding in terms of forms and techniques. She regularly brings new materials into her practice, engaging in a dialogue with each new medium; a meditation on what images the material might elicit in her mind or what forms its inherent structural properties are best suited for.</p>
<p>‘Forcing materials to have a premeditated form leaves more room for accidents, chaos, and entropy to enter the work,’ she says. ‘My authorship is contingent on the material’s ability to do its own thing, and my allowing it to speak its own language.’</p>
<p>The softness of alabaster, for example, carves nicely into doughy amorphous shapes, and for <em>Triple Helix</em> (2020), she blew clear, crystal quartz into the shape of a bell because of the material’s ‘amazing resonance.’ ‘It’s so structurally stable that when you strike it,’ she explains, ‘it vibrates at a consistent rate, which is why it’s used in timekeeping devices.’ The bell, suspended over an accompanying table supporting eight small-scale, voluptuous glass vessels that represent a family of women, presents lineage as a reverberation – a temporal echo that resounds through generations.</p>

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<p>A 2021 project included in ‘Formations’ stems from Akashi’s visits to the former Colorado River Relocation Center in Poston, Arizona, where her late Japanese American father had been interned as a child during World War II. He never spoke with her about his ordeal directly, and so she went in search of ‘evidence of the past.’ The first result was ‘Witness’, a series of gelatin silver photographs of trees standing stoically in the arid brush and bronze casts of their fallen branches. ‘I thought of the trees as witnesses from my father’s generation still standing during my generation,’ she says. Akashi also took rocks from the site to create her ‘Inheritance’ series: Her hands, cast in translucent green and red lead crystal and outfitted in costume jewelry she inherited from her grandmother, rest gently on the stones. The ‘Witness’ and ‘Inheritance’ works are exhibited on large rectangular pedestals of rammed earth, where clearly delineated layers of sediment embody the passage of time.</p>
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<p>Despite the personal and familial resonance of these sculptures, Akashi carries no sentimental attachment to the objects themselves, even as they’re acquired by collectors. ‘I can’t have these conversations without relinquishing some control and allowing them to go out in the world,’ she says. ‘So I let go, and let other people share them.’ The work retains its memory, regardless of where it might land.   </p>

<p>Kelly Akashi is represented by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1292/Tanya-Bonakdar-Gallery" target="_blank">Tanya Bonakdar Gallery</a> (New York City, Los Angeles).</p>
<p>‘Kelly Akashi: Formations’ is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego until February 18, 2024.</p>
<p>Janelle Zara is a freelance writer specializing in art and architecture. She is the author of <em>Masters at Work: Becoming an Architect</em> (2019). She lives in Los Angeles.</p>
<p>Published on September 26, 2023.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Caption for full-bleed image :&nbsp;Kelly Akashi, <em>Cultivator (Hanami)</em> (detail), 2021.<br></p>

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In her work on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, she explores the past and present through personal and cultural histories

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