“Formations,” Kelly Akashi’s ongoing exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, surveys the past eight years of the Los Angeles–based artist’s practice, mounting a menagerie of bronze-cast, hand-blown glass, carved-stone, and 3-D–printed sculptures in addition to an array of chromogenic photograms, Cibachrome crystallographs, and silver gelatin prints (not to mention the occasional accoutrement of family heirlooms and human hair). Amid all this processual prowess, attention is also paid to the more mysterious operations of memory, time, the human body, and their mutual imprint on one another. Always an alloy of the organic and inorganic, the tactile and the intangible, Akashi’s practice extracts meaning from the ore of object relations, striking at the heart of our attachment to things.

PEOPLE OFTEN BRING UP the idea of the “memento mori” with regard to my practice. But I found a Japanese term that, I think, fits much better: mono no aware. It refers to a wistful awareness of impermanence—the “pathos of things.” It’s central to hanami, the Japanese custom of venturing out to enjoy the brief season of cherry blossoms. That’s why I named one of the casts of my hand Cultivator (Hanami), 2021, and why it clutches a cluster of glass cherry blossoms. And Long Exposure, 2021, a cast of my entire body, is littered with petals from flowers that slowly decay. I want everything to somehow contain both a single instant, a moment, and an eternity.

“Formations” is decidedly nonchronological. I don’t see my practice as isolated bodies of work; I always try to keep my mind on the greater lifelong practice. So it’s been exciting to see similar themes and questions arise in works that were made years apart, sharing rooms together in conversation.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.