Storyville III (21/50)

The third composition in Oda's Storyville series — a title that invokes the famous red-light district of early twentieth-century New Orleans, subject of extensive photographic documentation by E.J. Bellocq that revealed the human lives behind the commercial transaction. Oda's Storyville compositions engage with the complex territory of female sexuality, commercial exploitation, and the reclamation of bodily autonomy — placing her characteristic goddess figures within a context that forces consideration of the distance between the sacred feminine of her Buddhist iconography and the commodified female body of patriarchal commerce. The series constitutes one of her most politically charged bodies of work.