Kelly Akashi: Formations - MCASD
Kelly Akashi: Formations
On view at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
September 21, 2023 to February 18, 2024
Review by Timothy LeBlanc
Kelly Akashi, Time Twine (California Poppy), 2022
Photo: Timothy LeBlanc
The work of Kelly Akashi is some of the best being produced today. She is able to use a vast variety of mediums to take on topics of representation, growth, and most interestingly time itself. At the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the solo presentation of Akashi's work titled Formations is the largest collection of her work ever presented. In mass the show will give anyone, familiar or unfamiliar, an understanding that the work is something that anyone can learn from.
Trained originally as a photographer Akashi presents some photography and works that play with the alchemical nature of the medium. Her work does not stop here. It instead moves in bronze, glass, stone, silicon, wax, crystals, wood, hair, rope, and even floral debris, water, and the earth itself.
Kelly Akashi - Foreground: Weep, 2020/2022. Background: Witness, 2022
Photo: Timothy LeBlanc
The show walks one through all of this. Upon rammed earth pedestals sit collections of pieces made from all of these different materials. The times each piece was made is shuffled through, so work made over the last 10 years mix. One will see that many of the pieces include casts of the artists hands. Each one taken at different times and acting as a record of the passing of time on the human form. Each originally cast in wax shows in its wrist the layers used to create the form for casting in bronze. Each of these layers acting like a record of a geologic time which is expressed further by the wrinkles locked forever in the bronze and the growth of the artist's fingernails.
Installation view
Photo: Grace Saunders
Pieces that pull from natural elements that one may more readily think of element of time in, are mixed into the pedestals and the rest of the show. Branches and weeds once growing now rest static in time. The tumble weeds bouncing across the desert find themselves more rooted than they have ever been before. This is mirrored in the excellent black and white photos Akashi shot at the former Japanese internment camp in Arizona. This time thought to be lost years ago and many miles away is made real in the work drawing you in and confronts the now as much as the past.
Though each work has a large impact their effect is compounded in the mass approach the museum has taken, mirroring the approach Akashi takes in gallery shows as well. This is true for all but one work in the show. Long Exposure, 2022 sits alone in a gallery dedicated just to it. The travertine sculpture shows not just the artist's hand but her whole body laid out frozen in time and space. On and around the sculpture are flowers and plant matter that has been left to wilt and dry. One can't help but think of death, both one that has come requiring this sarcophagus lid and that which the artist has cheated with this visage of themselves. If it was just this work, or the version in orange marble that was shown by the Hammer Museum this year, it would be worth going and spending time letting the piece do a little magic as only a truly excellent piece of art can.
Kelly Akashi: Formations is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego from September 21, 2023 to February 18, 2024 and is worth the visit, and the hours one will spend reflecting on the work that is sure to happen. There is a catalog of the same name which has been published on the occasion of the exhibition that is just as highly recommended.