By Mandy Tzoc Rodriguez, Correspondent
Amid the sounds of construction and under a warm Southern California sun, an audience made its way to Highview Avenue in Altadena this weekend to see an art exhibit forged from catastrophe, accompanied by a soundtrack of demolition.
Yellow and purple flowers bloomed on an empty property. A decayed chimney towered above the brush, with robust speakers playing demolition sounds.
It was a unique art exhibition, “Field Set,” by Kelly Akashi in collaboration with Phil Peters.
The two-day event on May 23 and 24 featured Akashi’s former Altadena home and studio, lost in the Eaton fire, with various sculptural art pieces and Peters’ field recordings playing through speakers.
The focus was on demonstrating how communities are able to transform “individual fragments into a resilient whole through collaboration.”
Akashi had lived in her home and studio for four years when the Eaton fires struck in January 2025, ultimately consuming hers and more than 9,000 structures while it claimed 19 lives.
Absorbing her own loss, Akashi sought ways to create art from the remnants of the devastation. She reached out to Peters, beginning a collaboration.
Akashi found that recording the demolition through sounds from Peters was a unique way to document the experience. Peters creates sound installations of subterranean noises through the use of his custom built microphones. The microphones have continuously recorded the sounds of debris removal and rebuilding in and around Akashi’s former home.
The recording is still ongoing with no timeline set.
Akashi was inspired by the nearby Bunny Museum’s placement of Scanner, a 14-foot-tall silver rabbit statue recently installed at the site.
The Bunny Museum, also lost during the Eaton Fire, unveiled the statue in February 2026 as a part of its reconstruction phase.
It was a signal that the museum was still here and worth supporting, a theme that resonated with Akashi, looking to establish her own vision.
“Somebody once said, or I read this somewhere, that, like, healing isn’t an abstract thing,” Akashi said. “It’s actually about building new positive memories in relationship to the trauma that’s happened. So I think on one hand, I’m hoping this literally does build these new positive events that really bring people together and shape new experiences here.
“… By doing things like this, I’m hoping it puts these stories back in the center, and people from the outside can maybe start listening, learning to understand, engaging.”
Through Peters’ sound recording of subterranean noises of Akashi’s home, the exhibit offered a chance for people to experience art in a deeper way, Peters said. With his custom speakers, the sounds that play are at a lower frequency than we can hear but experience within our bodies.
“It’s a perspective shift,” he said, for people to experience in a time where people are inundated with images and videos of disaster sites. “There’s something profoundly human and intimate about the sound. So to have an experience to offer something different, even the demolition of a home, there’s a closeness and an intimacy to that,” said Peters.
During the event, attendees were encouraged to sit upon the curated speakers and to feel the vibrations of the demolition sounds, immersing in the memories of that time and feel the connection to the home.
As they did, the sounds of neighboring properties, in the process of being rebuilt, mixed with the sounds of demolition being played through the speakers.
That didn’t go unnoticed by visitors.
“The most interesting part is the building that’s happening around us, having this house being rebuilt in the background, the hammering, the guys talking, their music playing, they’re carrying 2×4’s at the exact same time that you hear the sounds, the bulldozers, and whatnot coming from the speakers here,” said attendee Heather Tahtinen. “I think it’s really cool to see things being rebuilt in the middle of something that was super-obviously destructive that happened. And so, I think that’s really moving to see things being built around it.”
Akashi presented glass pieces with plants she grew in the community garden at her home. Some materials used were items from the fire or other re-workings of those materials.
As attendees walked through the stone paths around the property, a chimney stood over the patches of flowers, giving a harrowing, yet moving feeling of what the home once was. The chimney was the sole surviving piece of Akashi’s home, also know as the art piece “Witness (Altadena).”
Previously, Akashi recreated the chimney for the 2026 Whitney Biennial exhibit called Monument Altadena at the Whitney Museum in New York. The piece is still available to see until Aug. 23.
“It’s the chimney that we left that I kept, I will be testing it to look into rebuilding with it,” Akashi said. “But in the meantime, the foundations in the chimney are in this suspended moment, and my attitude is, ‘let’s make something of this moment.’”
With the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) commissioning the event, the artists showed Altadena and the community as continuously coming together during the time of reconstruction. LAND works to connects people and places through art.
Along with the exhibit, each day the event concluded with music from musicians connected to Altadena, such as Celia Hollander, Paul McCarthy, Alex Stevens, and John Wiese.
“It does actually show the healing power of art, and that even through this destruction, even something like this piece here, they managed to have something growing from it,” said attendee Ryan Nurse. “It’s just a really beautiful way to show that even in the hardest of times, in the most destructive times, when you’re left with nothing, creation is always there.”