GOCA by Garde is pleased to present In Passing, an exhibition of paintings by Ai Sogawa Campbell, Amy M. Yamamoto, and Natsu, on view at the gallery’s Chelsea space from November 12 through December 10, 2026. Through the low relief of cut material, layered color, and traced light, their paintings change with the viewer’s distance and with time. Each work holds an image partway through that change: color that will not resolve into one hue, the play of perception just before an image is recognized, one impression on its way to becoming another. Each artist arrives there through a distinct approach.
The exhibition takes its cue from the sound of the Japanese word utsuroi. Usually written 移ろい, it means shifting or change. The exhibition also writes it, poetically, as 虚い (utsuroi), using the character for emptiness to add a sense of hollowness and open space. In Passing attends to both: to time as it goes by, and to the room that opens before an image is filled with a settled meaning, and after that meaning has come undone. At a moment when images are read in an instant and passed along to the next, these paintings ask the viewer for distance and for time.
Ai Sogawa Campbell pours ink and powder pigment onto canvas and leaves their spread to gravity and viscosity. She cuts painted canvas by hand and builds the fragments into the surface, layer upon layer. Their contours recall leaves, petals, and feathers; held within a muted range of gray, mauve, pale pink, and ochre, they overlap in shallow relief, catch light and shadow, and seem like flames or butterflies moving of their own will. In recent work, set against personal experiences of loss and memory, she depicts the transience of the world and the beauty held in a single moment.
In Amy M. Yamamoto’s abstract paintings, fields of color with no fixed edges dissolve into one another through thin, layered paint. Each color spreads across the canvas without settling into a boundary, producing a scene that never comes into focus. Out of the haze, a few strokes of saturated color come into sharp focus, suggesting a flower or a gesture, then sink back into the surrounding color before they harden into form. In her figurative portraits as well, Yamamoto has long kept focus on a single part of a face and let the rest dissolve.
Natsu traces, in line, the sunlight that passes through the branches and leaves of trees. The shifting light in Central Park, on Fifth Avenue, and at her own window becomes a map toward the sun on the painted surface. Working with the traditional materials of Japanese painting, she gives form to cycles and to prayer through delicate color and geometric composition. Repeating the observation at the same place and hour never yields the same path of light twice; in the artist’s words, the work “looks the same, but never the same.”
The three artists differ in technique, motif, and procedure. What they share is that each holds something in transition on the surface, in her own way. In the moment an image comes undone, room opens for the viewer’s own memories, perceptions, and feelings. In Passing is an exhibition for looking closely at what changes, and for taking pleasure in the inward attention that arises with that change.
Ai Sogawa Campbell (b. 1978, Osaka) lives and works in New Jersey. She trained in oil painting at Kyoto College of Art and Design and moved to the United States in 2005. Her paintings and murals set hand-cut fragments of painted canvas into poured ink and powder pigment. Recent exhibitions include “Umwelt,” Gallery Makowski, New York (2026), and “Converge,” Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia (2024).
Amy M. Yamamoto is a painter based in New York. She works in parallel on abstract paintings in which edgeless fields of color dissolve into one another and on portraits that hold focus on a single part of a face. Recent exhibitions include “HIGH VISIBILITY,” GOCA by Garde, New York (2026), and “2024 Juried Selection Exhibition: Part 2,” Onetwentyeight, New York (2024).
Natsu (b. 1976, Japan) lives and works in New York. She holds a BFA from Joshibi University of Art and Design. Her paintings record light, clouds, and sound in points and lines of sumi ink and gofun. She has had solo exhibitions at the Hammond Museum, North Salem, New York, and was included in “Mapping Autonomy: Roots and Routes,” GOCA by Garde, Future Fair, New York (2026).
