Kelly Akashi: Formations

A beautifully produced introduction to Akashi's multimedia meditations on precarity and history

The first scholarly monograph on Los Angeles-based Kelly Akashi (born 1983), Formations encompasses Akashi's wide-ranging multimedia practice over the past decade. Much like the artist's own work, the catalog cultivates relationships between objects and materials to investigate how they can actively convey their histories and potential for change. Featuring a faux-leather hardcover binding with a gold foil titling and paper changes throughout, the publication follows the artist from graduate school to more recent research into the inherited impact of Japanese Americans' incarceration during World War II. Akashi's works in glass, cast bronze, multipart installations and photographic contact prints are given further context through scholarly essays. Along with extensive plates and installation photography, the book includes a new photography project by Akashi, a record of her scavenging for history in the site of her family's imprisonment in a WWII Japanese American incarceration camp.