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Kelly Akashi: Being as a Thing, 2245 E Washington Blvd., Los Angeles,

November 12 - December 23, 2016
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Kelly Akashi: Being as a Thing

Past exhibition
November 12 - December 23, 2016 2245 E Washington Blvd., Los Angeles
  • Press Release
  • Installation Views
  • Works
  • Press
Press Release
Kelly Akashi At Rest, 2016 Bronze, rope
Kelly Akashi
At Rest, 2016
Bronze, rope

François Ghebaly presents Being as a Thing, an exhibition of new work by Kelly Akashi. 

Working between sculpture, installation, and photography, Akashi cultivates relationships among a variety of ‘things’ to investigate their ability to transmit consciousness and how they can actively communicate their histories and potential for change. 

For this exhibition, the artist constellates interconnected processes of extended looking at—and by extension, coming to know—objects. Microcosms of glass, wax, bronze, and fiber highlight organic forms, at once familiar and foreign. The works presented balance the controlled environment of the gallery space with materials and displays that oscillate between the ephemeral, the durable, and the impressionable. 

A series of weeds, drawn from life with meticulous leaf tracing and entombed through lost wax bronze casting, take root in the floor and walls of the gallery suggesting a bridge between different modes of knowing, unknowing, and scrutiny. These studies of growth and change embody the artist’s attempts to understand the original thing.  

Walnut wood with corner splines frame a suite of photograms that offer an alternative perspective of several objects in the exhibition, resulting in an index of strange fossils that compress time and dimension. 

Central to Akashi’s practice is the production of candles in limitless forms, challenging the notion of what a candle can be, and what candle technology might afford as a process of making. They are burned or left in their uninterrupted form, suggesting a stymied action that oscillates between possibility and impetus, consecration and function. The dim light of the candles ask that the works around them be examined at close range, allowing a plaster headboard accumulating with gum or a bronze candle wreath to emerge in the space. 

Elsewhere, delicate lead mounds emerge from brick surfaces encrusted in the gallery’s brick wall, embracing the building’s industrial past. Hovering between her familiar bronze and wax materials, the lead behaves like candle wax, slowly accumulating in drips, gilded by chemical properties in the air that change the lead patina slowly over time. 

Two pairs of bronze hands draped over a small wall are a point of entry and a coda, each a unique moment of the artist’s physical history solidified in time. They are crystallized examples of the artist’s consciousness imbued in her things, but like the others, they are not her.

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Installation Views
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 1 Kelly Akashi Being As A Thing Installation View
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 2 Kelly Akashi Being As A Thing Installation View
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 4 Kelly Akashi Being As A Thing Installation View
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 8 Kelly Akashi Being As A Thing Installation View
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 9 Kelly Akashi Be Me Japanese Californian Citrus 2016
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 10 Kelly Akashi Being As A Thing Installation View
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 11 Kelly Akashi Being As A Thing Installation View
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 18B Kelly Akashi Arrangement Ii 2016
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 13 Kelly Akashi Being As A Thing Installation View
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 18C Kelly Akashi Arrangement Ii 2016
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 17 Kelly Akashi Being As A Thing Installation View
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 16D Kelly Akashi Activity Table 2016
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 20 Kelly Akashi Being As A Thing Installation View
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 21 Kelly Akashi Being As A Thing Installation View
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 24 Kelly Akashi Ways Of Being Arched Extended 2016
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 22 Kelly Akashi Wall Candles Installation 2016
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 26 Kelly Akashi At Rest 2016
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: 26B Kelly Akashi At Rest 2016
Works
  • Kelly Akashi, Image of a Thing (Pink), 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Image of a Thing (Pink), 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Image of a Thing (Amber), 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Image of a Thing (Amber), 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Overlay, 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Overlay, 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Cobalt Blue (Vertical Arrangement), 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Cobalt Blue (Vertical Arrangement), 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Stringer (Amber), 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Stringer (Amber), 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Cobalt Blue (Horizontal Arrangement), 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Cobalt Blue (Horizontal Arrangement), 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Hairy Weed, 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Hairy Weed, 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Tall Weed, 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Tall Weed, 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, At Rest, 2016
    Kelly Akashi, At Rest, 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Finger Figure, 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Finger Figure, 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Be Me (Japanese-Californian Citrus), 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Be Me (Japanese-Californian Citrus), 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Bending Weeds, 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Bending Weeds, 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Figure I, 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Figure I, 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Figure II, 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Figure II, 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Figure III, 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Figure III, 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Activity Table, 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Activity Table, 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Candle Wreath, 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Candle Wreath, 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Dreams (for GPK), 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Dreams (for GPK), 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, ways of being (arched, extended), 2016
    Kelly Akashi, ways of being (arched, extended), 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, ways of being (figure), 2016
    Kelly Akashi, ways of being (figure), 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Wall Candle (East), 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Wall Candle (East), 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Wall Candle (Tentacle), 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Wall Candle (Tentacle), 2016
  • Kelly Akashi, Wall Candle (North), 2016
    Kelly Akashi, Wall Candle (North), 2016
Press
  • Kelly Akashi

    Evan Moffitt, Frieze, January 10, 2017
  • Review: In L.A. galleries now: A celebration of black women, a cheeky take on living with disability

    Sharon Mizota, The Los Angeles Times, December 14, 2016
  • Critics' Picks: Kelly Akashi

    Honora Shea, Artforum, July 6, 2016
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