Explorations on the theme of ‘Memory’ and how our reality is shaped wrongly or rightly by it have always held a great fascination with me. In the work of Yuichi Ikehata these questions are given a very real and emotional form, a good example being this piece from his ‘fragments of LTM’ or ‘Long Term Memory’ series. Yuichi uses a process of mixed media, where he creates real sculptures with a combination of wire and paper, to then infuse them digitally with human traits like skin, eyes, nails,etc… These hybrid works blend the line between what’s real and fabricated much like our memories do all the time. What we remember of an event is not necessarily what exactly happened, it’s our own constantly re-written brain’s interpretation, much like how we can interpret a piece like this.
For me the subject of this piece seems stuck between two moments, almost as if the figure finds itself in a twilight zone between death on the left side and life on the right. I find it a very poignant piece in the series, which often create these dualities between a very strong human emotion and a more deconstructed, plastic form. With the artist we almost experience the minute the work is given life, a Frankenstein like experiment where we see this one moment being lost, created and lost again, like the fleeting strands of a failing recollection. Ikehata’s work has always been a personal favorite and I urge you to discover his new and old collections, to be stored or lost in your own memory for a time.
