Kelly Akashi: Formations
"Kelly Akashi: Formations" is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work—who is known for her materially hybrid works that are compelling both formally and conceptually.
Kelly Akashi: Formations (2022) by Kelly AkashiSan José Museum of Art
To watch a thing change as it chronicles the change in you. – Kelly Akashi
Kelly Akashi: Formations (2022) by Kelly AkashiSan José Museum of Art
Kelly Akashi blows, sculpts, casts, ties, and crafts many of these materials herself—their forms bear 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.
Kelly Akashi: Formations (2022) by Kelly AkashiSan José Museum of Art
This pervasive interest in time is imbedded in many of Akashi’s processes. It has led her to studies in botany, geology, and biology, research that is given form through old-world craft techniques
Cultivator (2022) by Kelly AkashiSan José Museum of Art
Weeds, shells, flowers, and rocks each become poetic points of departure for exploring fundamental questions of existence: about humanity, being in the physical world, and being in time.
Kelly Akashi: Formations (2022) by Kelly AkashiSan José Museum of Art
Each artwork in the exhibition suggests an intimate encounter, encounters that expand and reshape meaning as they are accumulated. Time is made material, and in it, we watch a thing change as it in turn monitors us.
Kelly Akashi: Formations (2022) by Kelly AkashiSan José Museum of Art
Inheritance
During World War II, 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and detained in government camps. Akashi’s father was a child when his family was sent from Los Angeles to the Poston Relocation Center in Arizona for nearly three years.
During 2021, the artist made several trips to the site of the former camp. There she encountered stones and tree branches that bore witness to these events, history imbedded in their sediment and carried within these botanical inheritors.
Conjoined Tumbleweeds (2021–2022) was cast from two plants the artist encountered, growing entwined, generations enmeshed like Akashi and her father. Weeds reoccur throughout the artist’s practice as a symbol of resilience.
Kelly Akashi: Formations (2022) by Kelly AkashiSan José Museum of Art
Being as a Thing
Akashi’s artworks are punctuated with human materials and forms: fingers, hair, fingerprints, breath, even the artist’s heartbeat.
As a maker of objects, Akashi cultivates a continuity between her body and glass, an all-absorbed state in which she becomes the material on which she is working.
Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes this experience as “being as a thing,” a term that Akashi has given to a slew of evocative, empathic objects. Many of her titles are imperatives, such as Weep, entreaties for compassion and kinship across species and materials.
Kelly Akashi: Formations (2022) by Kelly AkashiSan José Museum of Art
Life Forms
Objects rarely exist in isolation in Akashi’s practice. Forms prod and nudge one another, literally tied together as in Tethered Life Forms (2018) or captured in confrontation as in Hybrid Life Forms (2019–2021).
Sometimes Akashi gathers these beings in archival displays, evocative of the 16th century cabinets of curiosity that combined natural and manmade specimens without hierarchy.
Body Complex (2019) suggests linkages between the prehistoric shell dweller and the human body. In Akashi’s cosmos all life forms are bound together, emphasizing hybridity and relationality over systems of classification and division.
Kelly Akashi: Formations (2022) by Kelly AkashiSan José Museum of Art
Long Exposure
Long exposure is a term from photography that conveys the extended time required for an image to emerge.
Kelly Akashi: Formations (2022) by Kelly AkashiSan José Museum of Art
Akashi’s full body portrait Long Exposure (2022) is carved out of stone, suggesting both the layers of sedimented histories that form a body and the effort involved in locating oneself in that ancestral landscape.
Akashi similarly draws from histories of craft. Triple Helix (2020) is a showcase of traditional glass techniques from Murano, Italy, passed down through the studio art glass movement.
In channeling these patriarchal lessons into breasted and petaled vessels, Akashi alludes to both feminist lineages of craft and forms of knowledge that are somatically inherited rather than taught.
Support
Kelly Akashi: Formations is supported by the SJMA Exhibitions Fund, with generous contributions from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Fellows of Contemporary Art, Kimberly and Patrick Lin, Lipman Family Foundation, Mr. Cole Harrell and Dr. Tai-Heng Cheng, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Rita and Kent Norton, François Ghebaly Gallery, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Melanie and Peter Cross, and Wanda Kownacki.
Operations and programs at the San José Museum of Art are made possible by generous support from SJMA’s Board of Trustees, a Cultural Affairs Grant from the City of San José, the Lipman Family Foundation, the Adobe Foundation, the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation, Sally Lucas, Yvonne and Mike Nevens, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Yellow Chair Foundation,
the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Brook Hartzell and Tad Freese, the SJMA Director's Council and Council of 100, the San José Museum of Art Endowment Fund established by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the William Randolph Hearst Foundation.
Lauren Schell Dickens, SJMA chief curator
