Book Launch and Talk: Jay Ezra Nayssan, Kelly Akashi, Paulina Pobocha and Max Hooper Schneider on Mike Kelley

About Nonmemory 
‘Nonmemory’ brings together works by Mike Kelley and a group of artists—Kelly Akashi, Meriem Bennani, Beatriz Cortez, Raúl de Nieves, Olivia Erlanger, Lauren Halsey and Max Hooper Schneider—whose work similarly engages Kelley’s titular concept: the ‘non-memory’ of the various institutional spaces or built environments he encountered in his life. Documenting the eponymous exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles in 2023 – 24, the book also features reproductions of important works by Kelley, his foundational essay, ‘Architectural Non-memory Replaced with Psychic Reality,’ conversations with each artist, and a new text by exhibition curator and editor of the publication Jay Ezra Nayssan. 
 
About Jay Ezra Nayssan 
Jay Ezra Nayssan, Founding Director of Del Vaz Projects, is a queer, Jewish, Iranian American for whom place, gathering and exchange are of personal and cultural significance. His familial experiences of exile and immigration fuel his devotion to dissident and divergent communities, with a curatorial perspective informed by his investigations into how creative practice catalyzes notions of the built and natural environment, the mutability of conceptual and physical bodies, material culture in colonial geopolitics, and queer intersectionality in modern and historical contexts. With a diverse academic background that provides him with unconventional insights into the arts, Nayssan instills Del Vaz Projects with a holistic, multidirectional and distinctive approach—facilitating dialogues between artists of vast geographies and generations working across various mediums and subjects.  
 
About Kelly Akashi  
Kelly Akashi, based in Los Angeles, is recognized for her innovative work in sculpture. She has received notable accolades, including the MOCA Los Angeles Twelfth Distinguished Women in the Arts Award (2024), the LACMA Art + Technology Grant (2022) and the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize (2019).  
 
Akashi's recent solo exhibitions include a major showcase that traveled to the San Jose Museum of Art, Frye Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (2022 – 2024). Currently, her work is on view at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan, and she recently concluded a solo exhibition at Henry Art Gallery in Seattle (2023 – 2024). Upcoming group exhibitions feature her work at the Cantor Arts Center and Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Other recent institutional group exhibitions include Moody Center for the Arts, Houston (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024) and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023). 
 
Kelly Akashi’s work can be found in prestigious permanent collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum; MOCA Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum; Walker Art Center; CC Foundation, Shanghai; The Perimeter, London; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Sifang Museum, Nanjing, among others. 
 
About Paulina Pobocha 
Paulina Pobocha is an art historian, writer and curator specializing in art created between 1900 and today. She currently serves as the Robert Soros Senior Curator at the Hammer Museum and has just been appointed Chair and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. At the Hammer, she has played a crucial role in helping to shape the museum’s contemporary collections and exhibitions program. As she joins the team in Chicago, her work will continue to impact audiences across the country through her collaboration with Essence Harden organizing the next edition of the Hammer’s Made in L.A. biennial, surveying art from the greater Los Angeles region and opening in fall 2025. 

Additionally, Pobocha's major survey of the work of German artist Thomas Schütte is currently on view at MoMA until 18 January 2025.

Prior to her work with the Hammer Museum, during her 15-year tenure in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, she was central to the conception and display of MoMA’s modern and contemporary collection galleries. She also organized and co-organized numerous exhibitions including ‘YOU ARE HERE* Contemporary Art in the Garden’ (2023), ‘Guadalupe Maravilla: Luz y fuerza’ (2021), ‘Constantin Brancusi Sculpture’ (2019), ‘The Long Run’ (2017), ‘Rachel Harrison: Perth Amboy’ (2016), ‘Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor’ (2014) and ‘Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store’ (2013).

Pobocha received her BA in art history from the Johns Hopkins University and her MPhil, also in art history, from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She lectures widely, has served as critic at the Yale University School of Art, and is a frequent contributor to Texte zur Kunst. 
 
About Max Hooper Schneider 
Max Hooper Schneider (born Los Angeles CA 1982) graduated from Harvard University in 2011 with a master’s degree in landscape architecture. The foregrounding of material technologies and tactics of defamiliarization within the fields of biology, philosophy, landscape architecture and varying subcultures continue to inform his polymathic practice. Hooper Schneider’s work develops and explores the aesthetics of succession, abandonment, and the uncanny through the creation of habitats and installations that materialize and dramatize nature in diverse ways with nature conceived as a process of ceaseless morphogenic modulation, a relentless onslaught in which bodies, as formed matters, are continuously created, transformed, and destroyed. The resultant work voids the difference between the natural and the artificial, challenges conventional systems of both scientific and artistic classification, upsets valuations of high and low culture and suggests a worldview that strives to dislocate humans from their assumed position of centrality and superiority as knowers and actors in the world. Obsessive travel, documentation and field work in distant regions, and the sacrificing of his own material compositions to environmental elements remain integral to his codex of artistic procedures.

He continues to experiment across institutions, venues and outdoor sites locally and internationally and is held in major public and private collections around the world. Hooper Schneider lives and works in Los Angeles. 

About Del Vaz Projects
Del Vaz Projects is a non-profit art space based in Los Angeles, California—founded in a home-turned-artists’ space in 2014 and accredited as a 501(c)(3) in 2021. Our team collaborates with artists to manifest projects in our space and throughout our city’s cultural and historical institutions—with each endeavor, infusing diverse environments with a sense of collective intimacy, intellectual inquiry, and expressive invention. An incubator for artists, archives, and estates, our space is driven by four essential initiatives: a curatorial platform that produces on-site and off-site exhibitions; a research collective that pairs cutting-edge scholarship with experimental authorship; an independent press that designs, publishes, and distributes artist books and exhibition catalogs; and an artist production fund that secures fiscal and material resources for underfunded artists through our extended community of collaborators.

About The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts
The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts advances the artist’s spirit of critical thinking, risk taking, and provocation in the arts. Established by Kelley in 2007, the Foundation seeks to further Kelley’s philanthropic work through grants to arts organizations and artists for innovative projects that reflect his multifaceted artistic practice.

The Foundation also preserves the artist’s legacy more broadly and fosters the understanding of his life and creative achievements through educational initiatives including exhibitions, educational events, publications and the preservation and care of the Foundation’s art collections and archives.