Kelly Akashi at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, USA

18 June 2026

Until 26 June, 2026, The FLAG Art Foundation presents Spotlight: Kelly Akashi. The Spotlight series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork paired with a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful conversations between the visual arts and authors, critics, poets, scholars, and beyond. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Kelly Akashi’sHeirloom (Sundial), 2025-26.

A text by Franklin Melendez accompanies the presentation:

Loss, impermanence, transformation – these are the modalities of Kelly Akashi’s sculptural lyricism. Her choice materials articulate these drives through their inherent elemental properties: glass, bronze, photography. Each achieves form through a process of chemical conversion that hinges on giving up a previous iteration for a new incarnation – yet traces of the exchange remain persistent as integral visible components: erosion, oxidation, fissures – all markers of time, of swapping a ‘what was’ for a ‘what has not yet been.’ Perhaps this is just a roundabout way of saying things change.

Better yet, a concrete example: the sculpture before you. An etched glass plate perched atop a wooden display structure whose legs taper elegantly, creating a type of upward exertion almost as if reaching on tippytoes (this is how the artist affectionately describes it). The plate itself is a functional object, part of a printmaking process called ‘vitreography’ whereby an image (or ‘matrix’) is etched directly onto a glass surface and then run through a press to yield vibrant and highly textured prints (a ‘vitreograph’).

As with all of Akashi’s explorations, the technique is inextricable from its conceptual undergirding – in fact they are one and the same. And what initially drew Akashi to this somewhat idiosyncratic method was its ability to register loss as material absence as sandblasting bores onto the face to create an impression – essentially a carving out. Something of this harkened back to a project from 2019 where she recreated the interior of fossilized shells by casting a block of crystal around the void. The resulting form is less a discreet object than a negative of the loss of that original material - a hollow core cast. If so inclined, one could almost identify a mathematical logic at play: a negative times a negative yields a positive - or at least the possibility of one.