Kelly Akashi: Mood Organ: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to announce Kelly Akashi’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Mood Organ, on view at our New York City location from February 27 – April 18, 2020.

In this exhibition of all new work, Akashi challenges the ideological underpinnings of Western structures of knowledge, history, and time in a series of sculptures that formalize alternative models of genealogy and emotional connective currents. The title of the exhibition makes tangible the emotional being in all people, giving it a substance, or an organ, of its own. It also draws from a fictional device, the ‘Penfield Mood Organ’, which questions what we would do if we could control, direct, or utilize our feelings.

Rendered in the artist's evocative vocabulary, works in the exhibition include Weep, a human-sized bronze sphere that slowly emits water, as if softly shedding tears. As a physical embodiment of collective sorrow, this major sculpture also suggests compassion and comfort through its primordial shape and cyclical movement of water.

Undulating from the ground, a series of walnut pedestals congregate around the tearful fountain. The curves and fluctuations of these hand-carved wood formations are based on the rhythm of the artist’s heartbeat, as recorded on an electrocardiogram. Intricate sculptures featuring hand-blown glass, stainless steel and bronze casts of the artist’s own hands connect these objects to a human scale. Together, the sculptures and pedestals evoke instinctive bodily features and gestures, carrying them into perpetual existence. In her work, Akashi draws attention to the fluidity and interconnectedness of the media she uses. Incorporating the body, both as a form and as a medium, the artist captures the tension and complexity of materials, and emphasizes both the impressionability and physicality of objects.

On the second floor, Akashi’s references to geology, the body, and the natural world are rendered through a series of hand-blown glass branches suspending from the ceiling, sprouting from a rooted pedestal, and emerging from the ground. Like sets of growing limbs, these twisted and thorny forms are draped with rope, intertwining their delicate offshoots with knots and tangles.

In the next room, a collection of eight sumptuous glass vessels are arranged on a black stone surface with a quartz bell hanging above. Reminiscent of the female body and inspired by pre-Colombian urns, the sculptures allude to the mystical origins and instinctual knowledge of humanity encoded in all living people today. The curvilinear shapes graft past onto future, serving as a lacerated portal to the history of our most basic inclinations.