Kelly Akashi: Formations

Originally trained in analog photography, Kelly Akashi (born 1983, Los Angeles) is drawn to materials like glass, wax, and bronze for their alchemical potential to change states. The artist blows and sculpts these fluid materials into forms bearing the literal imprint of her body’s breath and touch. She regularly makes unique life casts of her hands, subtly marking time as fingernails grow and lifelines deepen. 

This pervasive interest in time is embedded in many of Akashi’s processes and led her to studies in botany, paleontology, and biology—fields that locate the human body within deep geologic history. She gives form to this research through both old-world craft techniques such as glass working and stone carving and new imaging technologies like CT scans and EKGs. Weeds, shells, flowers, and rocks become poetic points of departure for exploring fundamental questions of existence: about being in the physical world and being in time. 

Kelly Akashi: Formations is the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date. It spans nearly ten years of practice, from graduate school to recent research into the inherited impact of Japanese Americans’ incarceration during World War II. There is no chronology to the exhibition’s organization. Each artwork suggests an intimate encounter, and these encounters expand and reshape meaning as they accumulate. Together, Akashi’s works reveal that we are tethered to the lifeforms around us and are ourselves aggregate beings, formed of ancestral experiences and histories. 

The Frye is proud to partner in a multisite exploration of Akashi’s work with the Henry Art Gallery, where the artist will present a new commission opening September 30, 2023. 

Kelly Akashi (born 1983, Los Angeles) lives and works in Los Angeles. She earned her MFA from the University of Southern California. Akashi also studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste - Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design. The artist has presented solo projects at the Aspen Art Museum (2020) and the SculptureCenter, New York (2017). Other notable group exhibitions include those at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts (2021); the Hammer Museum’s biennial, Made in L.A. (2016); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2017); and the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France (2017). As the winner of the 2019 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize, the artist conducted a residency at the foundation in Ojai, California. Akashi’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Brooklyn Museum; CC Foundation, Shanghai; M WOODS, Beijing; and Sifang Museum, Nanjing, China, among others.   

Exhibition text translations in Spanish and Vietnamese provided by San José Museum of Art.

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