Toyoda introduced NAZUNA by saying (paraphrased) “you see the image on the screen, but you walk up to touch it, and it isn’t there; there is nothing there, only a moment that has already passed.” How wonderful for his already passed moments to come “to life” again in the performance of advancing picture after picture.
NAZUNA begins with images in the artist’s backyard garden. We see the greenery at its peak, threatening to overtake the hard walls that contain it. The next image is the twin towers, smoke rising from their just-hit sides. We are on the other side of the river and the distance between the viewer and the buildings gives a strange sort of perspective, one complicated by the knowing, now in 2009 eight years later, the fall-out from that day. But then we are in the garden again, and so it goes, intercutting from towers (smoke building) to garden (steady and green) to flowers piled up on the sidewalk, missing posters, notes of support, George W. Bush on the TV screen. There is the bumblebee, perched inside the flower. An intertitle: Next morning, the bumblebee was dead in the flower. The next slide is of the flower and dead bee; it looks so similar — unmoving bee on yellow flower — but now I am thinking about why this bee is dead: (a) it just happened to die, (b) it has some mystical connection to the towers falling, (c) it has a practical connection to the towers falling, maybe there are too many particulates in the air and all the bees in Brooklyn died that day.
What is nazuna? A common flowering plant (capsella bursa-pastoris), in English known as shepherd’s-purse, and an easy flower to overlook. Sitting under an 800 year-old willow tree, Toyoda recall’s Basho’s poem:
When closely inspected,
The nazuna is flowering
By the hedge.
It is this first inspection, the writing of this poem, that gives the nazuna a chance for second inspection, perhaps by the reader of the poem. It is Toyoda’s taking photographs (first inspection) and sharing them in a live presentation that gives us the time and place for our own close inspection.
This is the slow beauty of Toyoda’s work, the meditative journey you ride as an observer of the images and of your own thoughts and imposed narrative on the images. It is not a story, although there are stories deftly revealed through photos and intertitles, it is about the continuation of everything and the connections we choose to make or choose to ignore. The towers fall; the bee dies; the garden continues to grow. Toyoda photographs the head monk sitting in meditation; two weeks later he dies in a bulldozer accident during a snow storm. We see Toyoda’s parents at the table together, meal after happy meal. The food changes, the sweaters they wear change, and then Toyoda’s mother is dead and his father is sitting alone at the table: it goes on.
I was happy to watch this piece outside. Feeling the hush come over a crowd outside is something entirely different than the gallery quiet of a screening room. As the rain came and went, the sky grew ever darker and the group of silent observers journeyed from New York to Japan against the backdrop of our own city and our own imaginations.