Kelly Akashi

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to announce Kelly Akashi’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Mood Organ.

In this exhibition of all new work, Akashi challenges contemporary structures of knowledge, history, and time in a series of sculptures that formalize new models of genealogy, emotional connective currents, and ideological underpinnings of Western progression. The title of the exhibition makes tangible the emotional being in all people, giving it a substance, or organ, of its own. It also draws from a fictional device, Philip K. Dick's ‘Penfield Mood Organ’, which questions what we would do if we could control, direct, or utilize our feelings.

Rendered in the artist's evocative vocabulary, works in the exhibition include Weep, a human-sized bronze sphere that slowly emits water, as if softly weeping. A physical embodiment of collective sorrow, this major work also suggests compassion and comfort through its primordial shape and cyclical movement of the water. In addition, a collection of sumptuous vessels in glass, reminiscent of the female body, connect past and future as they allude to the origin of humanity’s instinctual behavior.

Through a variety of materials - such as glass, bronze, quartz, wood, and marble - this new body of work continues Akashi’s investigation of materiality, tactility, and time. The formal exploration is expanded into an emotional dimension that traces the evolution of sentiment and instinct.

In her work, Akashi utilizes indexical materials to emphasize the impressionability and physicality of objects. Often pairing delicate hand-blown glass with bronze casts of her own hands, the artist captures momentary gestures, casting them into perpetual existence. Her interest in the mapping of time has led her to study fossils from extinct species in order to locate humankind amongst other consciousness that have thrived along the earth’s geological timeline. Drawing attention to the fluidity and interconnectedness of the media she uses, Akashi aims to capture the tension and complexity of objects in her practice.

Born in 1983 in Los Angeles, Kelly Akashi currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. The artist graduated with a MFA from University of Southern California in 2014. Akashi studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste - Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design in 2006.

Akashi was commissioned to create a new outdoor sculpture for the Aspen Art Museum Crown Commons, opening on March 20, 2020. Winner of the 2019 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize, the artist had a residency and exhibition at the foundation in Ojai, California. Other recent residencies include Arch Athens, Greece (2019) and Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2019), both of which concluded with a solo exhibition. Among Akashi's important solo exhibitions is Long Exposure curated by Ruba Katrib at the SculptureCenter, New York (2017). The artist’s work was featured in the Hammer Museum’s biennial, Made in L.A. (2016); Brave New Worlds, Palm Springs Art Museum (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2017); LA: A Fiction, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France (2017); Take me (I’m Yours), curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jens Hoffmann, and Kelly Taxter, Jewish Museum, New York (2016); and Can’t Reach Me There, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2015).

Kelly Akashi’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; CC Foundation, Shanghai; M Woods, Beijing; The Perimeter, London; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; and Sifang Museum, Nanjing, among others.