Kelly Akashi – Artforum
1 May 2025
Long before one of the most devastating fires in the history of Los Angeles leveled artist Kelly Akashi’s home and studio, she was preserving the interstices where destruction and creation meet in bronze, stone, steel, and glass. As one walked through Akashi’s exhibition at Lisson Gallery, her first with the space, one quickly noticed the veil of velvety-gray ash and scaly-black patina on the bronze casts salvaged from the wreckage. Among the newly minted replicas of sculptures that couldn’t be recovered were crimson borosilicate glass tendrils, oversize seed husks sprouting ornate leaf buds, and a wall-mounted ring of weathering steel sprigs. Taken together, the objects, new and old, envisioned and enacted nature’s cyclical progression from degeneration to the promise of new life.
If the context lent urgency to the show, it was the artist’s mastery of her materials that precipitated the feeling of irrevocability. Just outside the gallery, visitors were confronted by an astonishing true-to-size relief of Akashi’s nude body emerging from a travertine pillar. The innumerable pockmarks constellating the surface of the stone can be interpreted as hollows yet to be filled—suggesting that the figure is still in the process of forming—or as early signs of its inevitable deterioration. The hardened wax from snuffed-out candles that spills from the lifted face and shoulders visualizes the presence of the past and animates questions concerning endurance and evanescence. What is the relationship between a flame and a stone, and a stone and the earth to which it will ultimately return? In other words, what is the flicker of a human life to the ever-turning Earth?
Inside, four smaller stone sculptures were displayed atop oversize Cor-Ten steel stands, each sparsely adorned with chains, seeds, flowers, or hands cast in crystal, glass, or metal alloys. The abundance of negative space on the weathered tabletops suggested not austerity so much as a connectedness that extends beyond the means of representation. Emptiness was transformed into substance. Two of the sculptural slabs, Monument, 2025, composed of striated onyx, and Monument (Home), 2024–25, crafted from pale alabaster, evoked ancient wayside shrines. Circular depressions, arched ingresses, and shallow shelves carved from the stones’ lustrous interiors accommodated an array of votive offerings: rose-colored crystal fingers, patinated bronze pine cones, and heirloom doilies passed down to Akashi by her grandmother. The tension between the delicate linens and the various naturally occurring materials threw the different meanings of inheritance into stark relief. It’s true: We carry forth human artifacts from the past but also humanity’s impact upon the land.
Read the full review in Artforum here.
