Kota Ezawa: Two Views

Kota Ezawa is one of the world’s preeminent appropriation artists. His source materials, video footage in the case of Kota Ezawa: Two Views, are pulled from films that have achieved iconic cultural status, but he alters them to generate new meanings. Ezawa’s images are created using rotoscope animation, a process whereby every image from the original footage is traced and filled in with solid colors. The result is a depiction of the world that is familiar, but hard to understand. Faces like Pierce Brosnan’s in The Crime of Artare surprisingly recognizable, but simplified so that one might second guess it is him they are seeing. The same can be said of the montaged landscapes in City of Nature. The flatness of the images makes it difficult to perceive depth and detail, but the human mind accommodates any inconsistencies and interprets them appropriately the moment after they are seen.

Biography

Kota Ezawa was born in Cologne, Germany in 1969 and is currently an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts. He earned his MFA from Stanford University and earned the title Meisterschüler from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.

Ezawa’s work has been showcased in solo exhibitions at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2005); Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2006); Madison Square Park, New York, NY (2011); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2013); Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2015); Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA (2017), and SITE Santa Fe (2017); as well as group exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (2005); Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2005); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2008); Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane, Australia (2010); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2010, 2016); Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (2011); the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (2013); Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany (2016); and Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA (2017). He is a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

Ezawa received a SECA Art Award in 2006 and a Eureka Fellowship in 2010. His work has been acquired by institutions such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, CA; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

The two videos on view during this exhibition will alternate every other week. Please see the complete listing below.

City of Nature

May 10 – 11, 2019

Week of May 21, 2019

Week of June 4, 2019

Week of June 18, 2019

Week of July 2, 2019

Week of July 16, 2019

Week of July 30, 2019

Week of August 13, 2019

The Crime of Art

Week of May 14, 2019

Week of May 28, 2019

Week of June 11, 2019

Week of June 25, 2019

Week of July 9, 2019

Week of July 23, 2019

Week of August 6, 2019

Week of August 20, 2019

Images:

Kota Ezawa, The Crime of Art, 2017, single-channel video, 2 minutes 33 seconds

Kota Ezawa, City of Nature, 2011, single-channel video, 4 minutes