I crouch down to get a closer look at Kelly Akashi’s blooming burial mound and ponder what it might feel like to photosynthesize. An undulating imprint of the artist’s body bulges beneath the landscape like a bloated corpse. Seedlings sprout through a blanket of crocheted flowers cast in bronze, emerging from the crevices of its latticed shell, tendrils thrusting out and reaching toward the sun like tiny hungry green fingers. Akashi’s installation at Villa Aurora, a 1920’s Spanish style home turned artist residency, considers reciprocal cycles of birth and death, growth and decay, past and present. Built into the Villa’s lush garden overlooking Pacific Palisades, the earth installation “Heirloom” is an emergent micro landscape, a flowering sarcophagus resembling an archeological dig of sorts, unearthing the past, which fertilizes the present, considering the relationship between the body and earth to imagine possibilities for a resurgence of life amidst the ruins. Akashi’s budding gravesite reminds me of a mushroom burial suit in its consideration for life after death and the understanding that mutual flourishing is an endeavor that requires multispecies cooperation. 

In a playful intervention with the architecture of the space, “Fractured Thigh Tooth” depicts an uncanny stone resembling a limp tooth or a severed torso resting languidly in the shallow pool of a fountain. There is something softly magical about this odd geological creature; it behaves like a fossilized soul that dwells in the water, creeping through the pipes, silently germinating the surrounding environment.

Villa Aurora
520 Paseo Miramar
Pacific Palisades, 90272
On view February 13-15-17-18, 2023
RSVP required