I have been paying attention to art of all kinds for most of my life, and Ikehata’s work is right at the very top of the most evocative works I have ever seen. Incredibly evocative. Thought provoking. Poignant. Emotional. A reminder of our mortality, our fragility. Staggeringly beautiful. Terrifying. Astonishing. Look at everything. Click on it all, see it full size.
Yuichi Ikehata works. Fragmented beauty: Japan’s Yuichi Ikehata – artist profile.
We live from moment to moment in a mix of truth and fiction that we consider to be reality. The distinction between reality and fiction is a relationship such that we require one in order to recognize the other, and at times they are so closely connected that we are unable to distinguish the two.
Fragment of Long Term Memory (LTM), an ongoing photographic series, conveys an unrealistic world through fragments of reality. My understanding of reality comes from its moments of beauty, sadness, fun, perfection, and those days when nothing special happens. Many parts of our memories, however, are often forgotten, or difficult to recall. I retrieve those fragmented moments and reconstruct them as surreal images.
I always feel an uncertain anxiety. I find it important to have this anxiety stimulated by negative factors and feelings surrounding the uncertainty of existence, because by feeling my own existence as small and unstable, this in turn will lead to my recognizing a vast world and being in awe of it.
Thank you Caine for posting these -- and all the other art-related posts. I wouldn’t otherwise come across things like this, so having an opportunity to see some of it, I appreciate.
You’re more than welcome, Jim. It’s pretty exciting just to share work like this.
Amazing stuff. I’m definitely going to look more closely at his work. Thanks Caine!
I find the third one down particularly powerful at first viewing.
Wow! Speechless.
Rob:
So did I. That was midway through all the works, and hit me like a train. That really encapsulates much of the way I felt through childhood.
I’ve done lifecasting and I can infer the process he’s using here -- doing skim coats of poly epoxy into a mold, then adding wires and textures. That’s hard. But the vision driving it … is amazing.
Lifecasts like he’s using are diifficult. As the size of the subject goes up, the difficulty goes off the chart. This guy is awesome. There’s my dose of humility for the day, well-served indeed.
D’oh! Marcus, you reminded me of a work I had meant to include -- see the last photo!