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Kelly Akashi — Wall Candle
Kelly Akashi

Wall Candle

2016

Wall Candle presents a deceptively intimate object: a disc of wax, bronze, and cotton wick mounted flush against the wall like a minimal relief, hovering at the threshold between sculpture and domestic artifact. Kelly Akashi, working in Los Angeles and known for her investigations into bodily materiality, vulnerability, and time, has here distilled those concerns into an object that is simultaneously inert and charged with latent transformation. The wax carries the memory of warmth, the cotton wick implies an act of ignition that has not yet occurred or has long since passed, and the inclusion of cast bronze anchors what might otherwise feel ephemeral into something with genuine material weight and permanence. The work invites collectors to sit with a productive tension: the candle is a universal symbol of passage and duration, yet in Akashi's hands it becomes something closer to a philosophical proposition about the nature of objects before and after their use. Produced in 2016, a period in which the artist was developing the central vocabulary that now defines her practice, Wall Candle occupies a meaningful place in her early output. At 15.2 by 15.2 by 5.1 centimeters, the piece is modest in scale but expansive in implication, asking the viewer to consider how much meaning can be compressed into an object small enough to hold in two hands. Signed by the artist, it represents a rare opportunity to acquire a formally refined and conceptually rich early work from one of the most thoughtful sculptors working today.

Medium
Wax, bronze, cotton wick
Overall
Signed
Yes

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About this work

Kelly Akashi, Wall Candle, 2016

Wall Candle presents a deceptively intimate object: a disc of wax, bronze, and cotton wick mounted flush against the wall like a minimal relief, hovering at the threshold between sculpture and domestic artifact. Kelly Akashi, working in Los Angeles and known for her investigations into bodily materiality, vulnerability, and time, has here distilled those concerns into an object that is simultaneously inert and charged with latent transformation. The wax carries the memory of warmth, the cotton wick implies an act of ignition that has not yet occurred or has long since passed, and the inclusion of cast bronze anchors what might otherwise feel ephemeral into something with genuine material weight and permanence. The work invites collectors to sit with a productive tension: the candle is a universal symbol of passage and duration, yet in Akashi's hands it becomes something closer to a philosophical proposition about the nature of objects before and after their use. Produced in 2016, a period in which the artist was developing the central vocabulary that now defines her practice, Wall Candle occupies a meaningful place in her early output. At 15.2 by 15.2 by 5.1 centimeters, the piece is modest in scale but expansive in implication, asking the viewer to consider how much meaning can be compressed into an object small enough to hold in two hands. Signed by the artist, it represents a rare opportunity to acquire a formally refined and conceptually rich early work from one of the most thoughtful sculptors working today.

Medium
Wax, bronze, cotton wick
Dimensions
overall: 15.2 x 15.2 x 5.1 cm
Year
2016
Signed
Hand-signed by the artist
Seen at
LAXART

Related themes

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