Storyville IV (14/50)

The fourth Storyville composition — continuing Oda's engagement with the complex historical and political territory invoked by the New Orleans red-light district and its Bellocq photographs. Each composition in the series presumably approaches the same fundamental subject from a different angle: perhaps different figures, different spatial arrangements, or different emphases within the visual language of female bodies, commercial space, and the assertion of personhood within conditions of exploitation. Oda's feminist Buddhist perspective transforms these subjects: her figures are never simply victims but always agents, their bodies expressions of a spiritual power that commercial systems cannot ultimately contain or diminish.