'It Smells Like Girl' featuring Kelly Akashi at Jeffrey Deitch and Company Gallery, Los Angeles, USA

3 September 2025

From 6 September – 1 November, Jeffrey Deitch and Company Gallery presents It Smells Like Girl featuring Kelly Akashi. It Smells Like Girl is a thematic group exhibition co-organized by the two galleries that revisits the charged and often misunderstood concept of female hysteria through painting, video, sculpture, performance, screenings, and installation.

The works in It Smells Like Girl embrace this disturbance, revealing states of rupture where the body speaks, when it refuses to be contained. Across mediums, the artists channel a sensorial vocabulary of refusal, one that resists clarity in favor of sensation, mood, and unease. Rather than pathologizing emotional excess, the exhibition proposes hysteria as a radical strategy that exposes the fractures beneath the surface. It is both an homage and a provocation; a call to witness, to question, and perhaps, to unravel. Here, the unruly becomes necessary and a method of survival that transforms instability into a form of presence, even power. As society continues to oscillate between revering and rejecting female strength, It Smells Like Girl asks what choice is left but to embrace the spectacle?

Executed with deft manual skill and astute material knowledge, Kelly Akashi's visual language emphasizes the impermanence of the natural world, recording and indexing fragmented moments in time. Her singular practice is characterized by a rigorous conceptual approach, yet the work is distinguished by a deep reverence for process. The repeated use of the hand as motif serves as a symbol for Akashi’s ongoing investigation into the temporality of the human experience. Often cast in bronze or crystal, her hands bear the mark of time on her body, her growing fingernails, and aging flesh.

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Image: Kelly Akashi, 2025, Lost wax cast bronze, brass wire, 45.1 x 50.8 x 35.6 cm, 17 3/4 x 20 x 14 in