L.A.-based artist Kelly Akashi, who works with photography and sculpture, among other mediums, has her first museum retrospective on view at the San Jose Museum of Art.
Kelly Akashi gives new meaning to the phrase “learning by doing.” The Los Angeles-born artist was initially trained in photography, but has since taken up candlemaking, glassblowing, bronze casting, and, most recently, stone carving. Her sculptures and photographs evoke tangled feelings about time, impermanence, bodies and our relationship to nature.
Her eyes light up when she talks about her latest fascination: stone carving, which she picked up during the pandemic. She describes how carvers are often attuned to what the stone is telling them, but in addition, “I realized I was projecting things into the stone, and then it’s sort of showing me something in my own mind,” she says, “That’s the kind of material conversation that gets me really excited to continue with a medium.
This respect for the process reflects her faith in craft traditions: strains of knowledge passed from one generation to the next through conversation, teaching and demonstration. She studied photography at Otis College of Art and Design and received her master of fine arts from USC but didn’t learn other craft techniques until later, when her mother taught her to make candles.
She began by photographing the mostly barren site, thinking about the passage of time on a larger scale. She was drawn to the trees around Poston, which were likely planted by Japanese American prisoners who were farmers and knew how to coax life from the desert. “For me, the site became maybe this connective tissue,” she says, “Geological time is so vast that when my father was there, and when I went to visit that site, it’s a very short amount of time, actually.
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