For anyone visiting the streets around East Broadway, New York it is clear immediately that they are in a constantly evolving urban scene. Contingency, is to the fore. The detritus of city living is often piled up curbside: rejected chairs, sofas, mattresses and assorted office furniture are typically still used by the passers-by inhabiting these streets—bringing a between space of public living in a passage of improvised and resourceful necessity and uncertain stress. What is experienced as a contemporary Flaneur passes with the split attention of phone screen and random materiality: a montage of shifting confluence. Europa’s Division Street digs are right here, an elevator ride away on the second floor, and just below Canal Street, at its eastern most section.
Europa retains the glass wall space divisions and glass doors from its former use as an office. For Aki Goto’s exhibition, white semi-opaque curtains subdue light from the floor-to-ceiling windows—the overhead strips are turned off. This gentle separation of inside and outside perfectly calibrates the installation as not entirely removed from life experienced away from gallery encounters. Video panels rest on reclaimed furniture, an image is projected through a found glass panel—a single spotlight in one room, and a bare electric bulb in an unshaded side light are the sole sources of artificial light apart from the video works themselves.
the land has to be the warmth (2025) comprises a horizontal and compact arrangement of found furniture, horizontally cut to the same height and supporting a sheet of glass across the assemblage’s entire length and width. At the mid-point, and on top of the glass, is a vertically oriented flat screen on which a vivid color digital video plays. Aki Goto typically uses her iPhone to video the less obviously portentous moments, and intimate humor, of family events—here, her daughter in a swimming pool. They become disjunctive accumulations of oblique experience, moving in an out of narrative: sometimes a context is clear, then lost, abstracted in bursts of fragmented fluid color and movement. Almost directly beneath the video screen is a chair with a patterned cushion that echoes the agitated folds of water in the pool above and the artifacts produced in video glitching. To the left of the screen, and also placed on the glass surface is a vase with flowers. The video is not only partially reflected in the vase, and in particular the glass sheet it is placed on, but also in the glass walls and doors of the gallery in a play of reflections and recombination of refracted points of view. The contrast of pasts and presence—between the motion and color of the videos—in all of the pieces presented—with the neutral color and worn humbleness of discarded furniture is striking, conjuring beauty through this juncture.
Goto’s mise-en-scene here is both elegant and precise: composing the bright flux and energy of video imagery with the exact placement of entropic, static objects within the gallery’s compartmentalized space. Both the child’s intermittent, direct gaze from video and the assorted objects—because composed this carefully—recall Yasujirō Ozu’s filmed interiors of orchestrated objects and people, and, for me, really unexpectedly, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas: including as it does a child’s returned gaze, incidental objects of a working space, and of course a mirror (adding the idea of a different virtual space to paintings own): its refection complicating the viewers relationship to the work—also, as in Goto’s installation, inviting the viewers identification and inclusion with the work rather than a distanced observation.
God Amused (2025) is another digital video, this time the screen is placed on a found leather armchair where a person would usually sit. Across another armchair, from what would have been a three-piece set, is placed a horizontal sheet of glass. The fullness of a succession of disjunctive video images juxtaposes with the transparency, emptiness, rand reflection of the glass: vertical orientation with horizontal orientation. Stéphane Mallarmé’s empty page now an empty sheet of glass on one chair, and Mallarmé’s roll of the dice a teaming unsteady movement of images on the other chair. In an extension of relational juxtaposing, Longevity (2025) is a drawing in ballpoint pen on paper. It is placed on the wall of a small room with closed glass doors, and a single electric lamp on a wide, waist-height shelf. The aesthetics of traditional Japanese culture do not approach objects, including drawings and paintings as entirely isolated from their environment. At the rear of a second small room a video screen is propped atop a found mattress. Thundery (2025) records a nocturnal storm, the emphasis on the passage of and reactions to sound.
An image of three generations of women from Goto’s family, Inheritance (2025) is projected through a glass panel and resting on the floor. Tradition, exile, continuity, displacement. Time as human experience and traces of temporality in objects of use point to the flow of temporality, as does generational succession. Crossing back and forth throughout the exhibition, playfully and unlabored, but with a seriousness not undermined by humor and chance—rather this only serves to underline and reinforce the experience of human contingency amongst a chaotic, unpredictable and occasionally beautiful world.
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Aki Goto (b. 1978, Tokyo, Japan) lives and works in the Hudson Valley, NY.
David Rhodes is an artist and writer based in New York.
