Kelly Akashi / Lisson Gallery, Los Angeles
- LA Art Documents
- Apr 2
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 3
Kelly Akashi
Lisson Gallery, Los Angeles
February 20 - March 29, 2025
Lisson Gallery’s inaugural exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Kelly Akashi was set to open on January 31 in L.A., featuring an entirely new body of work that both Lisson and Akashi were eager to share with her hometown. Akashi is an artist whose work and practice are imbued with the shared ethos and identity of her city. The beginning of 2025 brought heartbreaking devastation to many Angelenos. Akashi’s cherished home and studio were among the countless losses as the destructive fires tore through communities across Los Angeles in early January.
With an incredible amount of perseverance and support from her community, Akashi immediately went back to work, rebuilding and recontextualizing her exhibition. For her first exhibition with Lisson Gallery, Akashi triumphantly presents a number of new bodies of work featuring glass, earth, stone, lace, and bronze elements, incorporating both inherited and uniquely processed materials. Akashi personally recovered several bronze cast and borosilicate glass forms from the wreckage of her studio. She includes these objects in the exhibition, now with the somber patina created by the fire, acting as a record and acknowledgment of the event. These, along with other works, are hung on the gallery walls and installed among a landscape of stone and marble sculptures mounted on Corten steel pedestals, creating a singular and associative environment with its own circular ecosystem, rich with the possibilities of making, displacing, and reclaiming.
Intimate groupings of objects are dispersed across several oxidized plinths and tables, some splayed and disarranged, others forming concatenating configurations between carved and rough-hewn pillars and wedges of marble, as well as cast body parts and delicately hand-blown glass flowers. This mode of display mimics natural occurrences, perhaps of hands enclosing like caverns or plants growing out of cracks in the ground. Nearly every other object, however, has undergone a meticulous and labor-intensive transformation, shaped both by the artist and the forces of nature. This may involve the cutting and sculpting of multiple layers of materials such as alabaster, basalt, onyx, and limestone, or a remarkable alteration of substances—transforming skin into crystal or stems into glass. Other works present intriguing juxtapositions, such as an organic form emerging from a bronze cast of the artist’s lower face, or a delicate glass chain, damaged by the Eaton Fire, that adorns a basalt structure. A cornerstone of the exhibition, Akashi presents an exceptionally elaborate glass sphere made from finely latticed borosilicate glasswork, its detailed and delicate structure seemingly impossible in its complexity and ethereal nature.
Draped over the weathering steel surfaces are a number of lace doilies that belonged to the artist’s grandmother and recently came into her possession. While these might suggest traces of the personal, domestic and emotional narratives attached to such heirlooms, something the artist is known to do, they also contain the universal truth of familial lineage, of the passing down of knowledge and the unavoidable, constant inheritance of history.
From recent exhibitions centering on the fragility and complexity of the figure and especially her own body, Akashi now turns to the resilient and regenerative properties of nature, through a series of scanned, sculpted, and drawn seed pods. Initial CT scans of Devil’s Claw, Sweet Gum and Datura seedpods, among other species, are blown up to triffid-like proportions, 3D-printed and cast in bronze. Whether hanging like ornamental, ceremonial lights or scored into surfaces with silverpoint like cave paintings, these pods offer up their secrets to life more or less readily, some seeds lying dormant but still filled with potential while others have long ago scattered and sprouted new growths – all have the potential to change the world. Akashi’s alchemical transformation of matter enacts the continuous life cycle begun by the seed, revealing how all of existence is already in front of us, even if what was once made of one substance may now appear in a different form and might yet soon become something else anew.
