Kelly Akashi’s First Museum Solo Show Includes a Range of Mediums

Formations is decidedly nonchronological. I don’t see my practice as isolated bodies of work; I always try to keep my mind on the greater lifelong practice. So it’s been exciting to see similar themes and questions arise in works that were made years apart, sharing rooms together in conversation.

These photographs were taken in Poston, Arizona, where my father, his parents, and his siblings were interned during World War II. They had to leave their Boyle Heights home—and my grandfather’s business in Little Tokyo—and had no idea how long they would be gone. The artist David Horvitz, who is also Japanese American, told me that the trees that still stand on these sites were most likely planted by the people interned there. Many of the interned Japanese Americans came from agricultural backgrounds, and apparently, they built ponds, cultivated the land, had harvests, and added these trees. The trees, along with some barracks and an adobe brick schoolhouse, are all that remain, and they won’t live forever. —As told to Juliana Halpert in Artforum.