Spotlight: Kelly Akashi

MAY 27-JUNE 26, 2026

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.

Heirloom (Sundial), 2025-26
By Franklin Melendez

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.

All forms of making carry knowledge in them and, precisely because of this, all forms of making are in themselves forms of care. The level of care is amply evident here in the almost fastidious attention to specificity in the search for an appropriate vehicle for the matrix in question, a latticed starburst that adorns the center of the plate. The image is drawn from the artist’s personal archive, a set of vintage doilies that once belonged to her grandmother that she fortuitously rescued from a family garage sale around Thanksgiving 2024. She stored these precious memory wares in her home studio in Altadena, carefully scanning each of them and experimenting with their placement in new sculptures until they burned, along with all attendant structures around them, in the Eaton Fire of 2025.

The images that now remain are composites of those pre-fire scans and scans of remnants found in the aftermath, charred fossils tentatively clinging to form. Ultimately, Akashi’s formal explorations led her to pursue an alternate solution to vitreography. The end result is Imprints, 2026, a series of embossed prints of the enlarged doilies flocked with book ash also rescued from the site. These are currently on view in the Whitney Biennial 2026 at the Whitney Museum of Art and in her companion solo exhibition, Heirlooms, at Lisson gallery.  What we have here before us, then, is one possibility arrested or stalled in a state of latency. And our experience is made all the more poignant for it as it allows a glimpse into an open-endedness that is always at play in Akashi’s work but perhaps not as readily apprehended. At certain times of the day, the afternoon sun will flood into the galleries, shining through the plate to create a projection: the negative becomes a lens. Akashi has pondered if perhaps this ephemeral optical event is the actual artwork (after all, phantasmagoria has been tethered to photography since its very inception).

Alternately, we can think of this display as a ‘figure’ – in the sense of a non-textual illustration of an idea (think ‘Fig 1’, ‘Fig. 2’ in medical textbooks).  However, as the term implies, there is an inherent allusion to the body (here we’re back to tippytoes) but this is not a representation of it – it is present only as abstraction like Akashi’s own body in her casts (or arguably her entire output). The distinction is key because in its abstraction, we’re able to commune with the more immaterial qualities of the body; those emotive possibilities that exceed far beyond its fleshy contours: a body that grieves, a body that yearns, a body that harbors knowledge it does not fully apprehend. A body unmoored presents a site of radical possibility precisely because it is not fixed to a single position and thus presents itself to be infinitely reimagined.  This approaches an almost ontological stance for the practice.

Mulling on an upcoming public project, Akashi ruminates on some of these implications: “It's exciting to think that sculpture can send a message to coming generations. I’ve been approaching public sculpture in that way, and how its forms have been produced and presented to us by past generations. And now, looking ahead, I think about it as a vehicle to relate to unknown futures and unknown bodies – how we can come to meet them even when we no longer inhabit our own bodies.” Sculpture as astral projection? Who can say with any certainty, but what a thrill to imagine.

About: 

Kelly Akashi (b. 1983, Los Angeles, CA) received a BFA from Otis College of Art & Design in 2006 and an MFA from the University of Southern California in 2014. She also studied at the prestigious Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 2010. Akashi has been commissioned to create a monumental sculpture for John F. Kennedy International Airport’s New Terminal One (NTO), opening in 2026. She was also awarded the Hyundai Terrace Commission for the 2026 Whitney Biennial. In 2025, Akashi was chosen as an Artist-in-Residence at Pilchuck Glass School. Recent solo exhibitions include Heirloom at Lisson Gallery in New York, USA (12 May - 25 July, 2026), Kelly Akashi at Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles, USA (20 February - 29 March 2025), Kelly Akashi – Converging Figures Fondazione Furla Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, Italy (13 September – 8 December 2024) and Kelly Akashi: Encounters at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, USA (30 September 2023 – 15 June 2024) and her 10-year survey, Formations, which began at the San José Museum of Art in 2022, travelled to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and then to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, through 2024. Recent group exhibitions include Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (3 December 2025 - 29 March 2026), A Garden of Promise and Dissent, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, USA (17 November 2024 – November 2025); Spirit House, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, USA (4 September 2024 – 26 January 2025); Ecstatic: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2023); Ground/work at Clark Institute, Williamstown, USA (2020); Possessed, MO.CO Panacée, Montpellier, France; Take Me (I’m Yours), The Jewish Museum, New York, USA (2016); and Made in LA: a, the, though, only, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2016). Akashi’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, USA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA, USA; Sifang Museum, Nanjing, China, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA; and X Museum, Beijing, China, among others.

Franklin Melendez is a writer, independent curator, and art advisor. He has been a regular contributor to numerous art publications, among them Artforum, Frieze, Flash Art, and Kaleidoscope, where he also served as Arts Editor. He has also contributed to artist monographs and institutional publications, including for the 2022 exhibition Heroic Bodies at Rudolph Tegner Museum, Denmark. In 2017, Melendez co-founded the New York-based art advisory and curatorial firm, DM Office, along with Romain Dauriac. DM Office has organized exhibitions throughout the US, Latin America, Asia, and Europe, most recently Hudinilson Jr. Selected Works: 1978-2000 at 15 Orient, New York. Forthcoming projects include exhibitions in Shanghai and Taipei. Melendez splits his time between New York and California.

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