Article by Cornelia Feye

September 25, 2023

Every year, L.A. based Kelly Akashi makes a bronze cast of her hands to mark the passage of time and chronicle its changes in her body and in the world around her.

Casts of her hands are everywhere in Akashi’s exhibition, Formations, at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), on view now through February 18, 2024. They rest on fragile glass bubbles, or hold onto ropes strung along the wall of the gallery. In Cultivator, a bronze-cast hand holds a twig of translucent handblown pink flowers, looking like cherry blossoms. The contrast between the heavy metal and the almost weightless glass flower branch, made me hold my breath for fear of disturbing this tenuous balance. Another hand rests on a fabricated-concrete pedestals, adorned with a ring of Akashi’s grandmother.

All these constellations of objects are connected to time. Ropes represent the twisted or spiral-shaped timeline of our lives, which never proceeds in a straight forward fashion.

California Poppy, is a large orange glass flower, attached to a spiral rope resembling meandering time, twisted and curled—never straight. The small, orange poppies in the fields of our California landscape enjoy a fragile and short-lived beauty. Their lifetime is limited to a few days. In the exhibition, the orange flower is large, hand blown by the artist with her team with Moreno glass, but fragile. One wrong move and it will fall from the wall and shatter on the floor.

“To watch a thing change, as it chronicles the change in you.” Akashi states as an intention of her work.

Two branches of tumbleweed found at the former Japanese internment camp Posten in Arizona, where her father was a prisoner, have been frozen in time. The changes are arrested by the process of casting their shapes in bronze. They form the first sculpture a visitor encounters when entering the exhibition.

Several objects from Posten have been thus immortalized: rocks, pine cones, branches, all fabricated in bronze, glass or polished stainless steel. Branches the artist collected from trees, bore witness to what took place at Posten internment camp. The lifespan of trees lasts several generations. Many trees were planted by the inmates.

A large, round sculpture entitled Weep, is topped with a bronze-cast branch from Posten. Water trickles down from eighteen holes along the ball-shaped sculpture’s metal covering, leaving rust-colored trails, that will turn to green patina eventually.  Another reminder of the changes of time. Like tears, the water rolls down the sphere’s surface into the water basing below, where it gets pumped back up. The subtle sound of running water fills the gallery with a calming ambience.

            Another sculpture emitting sound is suspended above a table with six glass vessels representing mothers, surrounded by rope resembling an umbilical cord. A museum employee rang the glass bell while I was there. It vibrated in a high frequency, and everybody present stood still and listened, for a moment suspended in time.

            For the final sculpture, Long Exposure, the artist’s cast her body in travertine laying on a stone bench, like a medieval memorial or sarcophagus in a European cathedral. Akashi explained that she didn’t want this sculpture to be just about the past or herself. Therefore, the piece includes a botanical element—a deconstructed bouquet of flowers of purple and yellow petals strewn over the stony body by the museum staff.

Like every piece in this exhibition of subtle elegance, Long Exposure is personal, but also much more. It is a reminder of heritage, passage of time in nature and ourselves, American-Japanese history, and geological time, which lasts so much longer than our short human life span.

Kelly Akashi: Formations, MCASD La Jolla, September 21 – February 18. 2024