The garden in the backyard of his Brooklyn apartment, over the ground ants and slugs coming and going, doing what they do to live: there Toyoda fixes his persistent gaze. Who does this - take pictures, in some corner of New York City, over and over of the micro-cosmic world that most people would completely overlook? And not only that but shots of his daily routine, casual aquaintances and close friends are embroidered into the fabric of the work; and the repeating image of a round mirror abandoned in the backyard that reflects the changing seasons and gives the sensation of the cycles of nature and the universe; and images of snow falling down from the night sky, showing for a little while the vastness of the dark space; and then: the time he traveled to meet an Amish family, an unexpected encounter with a former lover in Japan, his encounter with a lost seal; then, a newspaper article about Palestine or media attention to a school shooting that make us feel the tremors of the larger world.

I don't intend to describe Toyoda's slideshow in every detail. What I want to express is that in Toyoda's projected work various aspects of time - for example the time of insects, the time of humans, society's time, the time of the earth - are masterfully woven together, resonating, ferrying us back and forth between the micro-cosmic and the macro-cosmic world.

From the artist's talk, I gathered that Toyoda is interested in Basho, who used small things to express universal themes in his poetry. Before I knew this, I felt strongly in my experience of the work, a desire to transform images into words. Speaking of his own work, Borges said: "it's somewhere between a movie and a novel." Paraphrasing this, I might say of Toyoda's slideshow: "it's somewhere between photography and Haiku literature."

Masafumi Fukagawa,
Curator, Kawasaki City Museum,Tokyo