Kelly Akashi leaves no material behind. Working primarily in photography and sculpture, she displays equal facility with bronze, wax, blown glass, and photogram prints. The artist’s sculpture is delicate yet confident, and she often focuses on small gestures and snippets of human anatomy: a typical piece might pair a bronze hand holding what appears to be a bulbous glass banana. As she said in an interview with aqnb, “I am most satisfied when it is difficult to discern where exactly my hand comes into play.” If the extent of Akashi’s hand becomes difficult to detect in the work, the unclear edges of the exhibition itself are also made important. “Instead of creating work that responds to a space with strong character,” Akashi explains, she considers what it may “lend to the history and biography of the work.” Akashi's first major institutional show, which was held at New York's SculptureCenter, was abundant with blown glass, twisting candles, rope, copper, delicate tree branches, photograms, and cast hands, often installed atop (or penetrating) the smooth surface of cherry wood. Elsewhere they sat or hung, clustered or alone, in nooks and ledges throughout SculptureCenter’s windowless subterraneous spaces. A 16mm projection was also introduced, throwing flames onto a perforated copper screen. 

Born in 1983, Kelly Akashi currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She has recently presented solo exhibitions at SculptureCenter in New York (2017), Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles (2016), and Tomorrow Gallery in New York (2015), among others. Recent group exhibitions include Lyric on a Battlefield at Gladstone Gallery in New York (2017), Dreamers Awake at White Cube in London (2017); and Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2016); Akashi holds an MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and has studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste-Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main as well as Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles.

Text courtesy of Artsy and aqnb