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Kelly Akashi: Formations

Institution
San José Museum of Art
Grant Cycle
Fall 2021
Amount
$50,000
Type of Grant
Exhibition Support
Website
sjmusart.org/exhibition/kelly-akashi-formations ↗
Kelly Akashi, Body Complex, 2019. Red oak, hand-blown glass, stainless steel, stereolithography 3D print, ortho litho prints in walnut artist’s frames, found medical illustrations, whipping twine, and cut onion, 49 × 72 × 11 inches.
Kelly Akashi, Cultivator (Hanami), 2021. Flame-worked borosilicate glass and lost-wax cast bronze.
Kelly Akashi, Being as a Thing, 2019. Hand-blown glass and hair, 6 ½  × 12 ½  × 12 ½ inches.
Kelly Akashi, Eat Me, 2016. Bronze, rope, silicone, silicone pigment, glass, and steel, dimensions variable.
Kelly Akashi, Transmission, 2019. Stainless steel, hand-blown glass, 65 ½ x 13 ½ x 13 ½ inches. Courtesy of the artist, François Ghebaly Gallery, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
Kelly Akashi, Glass Study (Image 5), 2014. Chromogenic photogram, Two parts, each 14 × 11 inches.
Kelly Akashi, Inheritance, 2021. Poston stone, cast lead crystal, heirloom (grandmother's ring), 6 x 8 x 6 inches. Courtesy of the artist, François Ghebaly Gallery, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
Kelly Akashi, Conjoined Weeds, 2020–21. Lost-wax cast bronze and cut and etched copper foil, 35 × 8 ½ × 6 ½ inches.
Kelly Akashi, Figure Shifter, 2018. Steel, wing screws, cherry wood, walnut wood, stainless steel, rope, blown glass, hair, ortho litho film, bronze, cotton thread, silk thread, brass wire, 72 x 72 x 12 inches. Courtesy of the artist, François Ghebaly Gallery, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.

Kelly Akashi is known for her materially hybrid works that are compelling both formally and conceptually. Originally trained in analog photography, the artist is drawn to fluid, impressionable materials and old-world craft techniques, such as glass blowing and casting, candle making, bronze and silicone casting, and rope making. Encompassing a selection of artworks made over the past decade, Kelly Akashi: Formations is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work, and will feature a newly commissioned series in which Akashi explores the inherited impact of her family’s imprisonment in a Japanese American incarceration camp during World War II.

Through evocative combinations that seem both familiar and strange, Akashi cultivates relationships among a variety of things to investigate how they can actively convey their histories and potential for change. She often pairs hand-blown glass or wax forms with unique and temporally specific bronze casts of her own hand, each a unique record of the slow-changing human body. Akashi’s interest in time—embedded in the materiality of many of her processes—has led her to study fossils and botany, locating humankind within a longer geological timeline.

See Also

Foundation

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Announces Fall 2021 Grantees and New Website

12 January 2022

1986

Warhol painted more than 100 works related to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, which some have read as complex reckoning of his homosexuality, Catholicism, and mortality in response to witnessing AIDS devastate the gay community.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
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