Estranged from Sight, 2024
Installation

Interested in the movements performed through and with different histories and geographies, Lucas Odahara’s new body of work Under the Impression recognizes abstraction as a form of resistance against the violence of representation.

Over the past year, the word “impression” has become a point of departure for Odahara, both in a theoretical way—how one experiences the world as an assemblage of impressions of everyday experiences, histories, memories, and desires—as well as in a material way, with the traces left behind by the technique of embossing. By pressing different objects and shapes into paper and steel, his works pay close attention to composition, exploring notions of distance, presence, and permanence. Odahara makes use of juxtapositions, cutouts, layering, and covering in an open, vulnerable process. One question he addresses in the making of these pieces is that of vulnerability, or the instability of how we perceive the world and the self. To be under the impression of something is to believe with little evidence, to make decisions in the threshold of knowing. How can we welcome the opaqueness, the non-negotiability, and the instability of time?

The works in this series function as assemblages of the vague impressions present in that suffuse everyday life. Stemming from found objects, to archival images and free forms, Under the Impression looks at the perseverance, limits, and relationships between us and the shapes we encounter: between the material’s surface and its bottom, between the object and the press, between remembering and forgetting. 

Including works:

I was under the impression I was made of two opposite beginnings, 2024
Paper, steel, wood, steel apparatus
120 x 90 cm

I was under the impression of an imminent ending, 2024
Paper, steel, wood
120 x 90 cm

I was under the impression of something missing, 2024
Paper, steel, wood
60 x 80 cm

She is so bright away from the big city lights. Night escape, homebound, veil. Two distances from the same luminous skin. First of shapes. Kaguya’s calling,  2024
Steel


To give animated figures the impression of movement, 2023
Glazed ceramics, wood, steel cable

Estranged from Sight (reading space), 2024
Wood, stool, microphone, speakers, text

Images: Installation view at Jan van Eyck Academy. Maastricht, Netherlands. 2024