Opening of Enter through the Thrift Shop by Justin Aversano

Justin Aversano presents Enter through the Thrift Shop, a site-responsive exhibition occupying all seven floors of 60–62 East 11th Street. Bringing together 366 paintings, a feature-length film, large-scale moving-image installations, photography, and new works, the exhibition draws from a year-long journey across seven continents.

Installed throughout the building, the exhibition moves from past to present to future, unfolding as a meditation on life and death, memory, human connection, and our position within the larger structures of space and time. Moments shaped by chance and circumstance accumulate into a chain reaction, in which one event reverberates into another, revealing the often imperceptible structures that connect lives and suggest a deeper sense of human interconnectedness and oneness. The exhibition traces a continuum from analog to contemporary image-making, bringing painting, silkscreen, photography, and Super 8 into dialogue with digital forms. Across these mediums, fleeting moments are recorded, preserved, and transformed, reflecting on mortality, presence, and human connection within a culture increasingly mediated by technology.

The exhibition is also in dialogue with the building itself, whose history is deeply intertwined with photography, and extends Aversano’s ongoing engagement with image-making and new technologies. Developed and realized independently, the exhibition takes the form of a full-building takeover produced outside the conventional framework of gallery or museum support. Its realization has been made possible through the sustained support of collectors and patrons who have engaged with Aversano’s practice over the years, a community whose belief in the work has enabled an undertaking of this scale to emerge independently.