Kota Ezawa
b. 1969
Kota Ezawa is a Japanese-German artist currently based in San Francisco. Ezawa meticulously recreates, frame-by-frame, animated sequences from television, cinema, and art history using basic digital drawing and animation software. His aesthetic is a highly stylized mixture of Pop Art, Alex Katz, and paint-by-numbers pictures, to name but a few of his stylistic antecedents. This painstaking process creates an in intriguing facsimile of the source material, which include the Kennedy assassination, the O.J. Simpson trial, and clips from the film (1915) and the Zapruder 8mm film of the Kennedy assassination. The reanimation of these horrific, yet familiar, historic events gives the work its emotional charge. Ezawa forces us to acknowledge the historic and cultural distance between us and the depicted figures that feature so prominently in America's public memory. A similar effect is achieved in his 2002 work , where Ezawa animates the delivery of O.J. Simpson's verdict using the courtroom footage as source material while keeping the original audio from the footage in place. Both of these works' stylistic artificiality underscore the manufacturing of the historical spectacle and para…
Films