Kelly Akashi at Tomorrow

Artist: Kelly Akashi

Exhibition title: &

Venue: Tomorrow, New York, US

Date: November 22, 2015 – January 10, 2016

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tomorrow, New York

You are the Objects that grew up around Me for the past few years. I named you My Alphabet and hung you on the wall as a relic of last year. You are scorched and broken like our world.

I starved your fre by means of a thumb screw. I cut off your oxygen, made your whole body fush metallic purple. Now that we’re bigger we can’t do that. My breath won’t be able to puncture your skin like before.

Remember when I saw your long fngernails and thought you’d be down for the moment… I made a river of silver like a mercury mirror. It formed into three intertwining hands that stand in place of our adolescence — our table top activities. You reminded me that I’m holding on to a fabricated past, and that only trash and junk last forever since they’re damaged by fault.

The frst breasts I saw weren’t yours — they were in a pamphlet from a soft-core French stage show. They were painted with spirals and cast in purple light, arching backwards in line with her spine, framed by a copper hoop.

Can’t help but love to watch you grow. I was your mother after all.

People think you are fragile and poetic but they don’t understand that you are weeping with time. You are a monu- ment to yourself, like the body of a cavern.

What if they resurrect me 300 years later, just because I made sure to hang around. Just because I don’t under- stand the difference between my waste and my self.

The greatest gift I can give you is the present, the erosion where the past and your path struggle to meet. It’s in your body right now, everything inside you, the experiences of our foremothers, accumulating until this moment. Where you and I were connected knots shaped like melted ampersands remain.

The greatest gift is where metals and liquids won’t meet and erupt in fractures. It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen that made me question why I ever thought anything was beautiful.

The frst time I heard that smash, a glass vessel full of potential, I never really knew what it could have been but I had ideas and fantasies that I had to let go.

Gotta learn to let go.