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KOTA EZAWA | CITY OF NATURE

09-09-2011 09:03 AM CET | Arts & Culture

Press release from: FELDBUSCHWIESNER Gallery

FELDBUSCHWIESNER is pleased to announce Kota Ezawa’s debut screening in the gallery’s video-space. The gallery will present the artist’s most recent animated films City of Nature and Beatles Über California from 2010 and 2011.

Kota Ezawa translates iconic moments from photography and film history into animations that are reminiscent of the pop aesthetic of South Park cartoons and Warhol’s screen prints. The artist bases his works on the fact that history is nowadays usually communicated via media and transferred into collective memory through images from news broadcasts. He subsequently employs elements from popular culture in his works, as well as well-known film citations such as the rendition of judgement in the lawsuit against the O.J. Simpson, Last Year At Marienbad by Alain Resnais, or amateur shots of the murder of the US president John F. Kennedy. For his animations, Ezawa reconstructs each single shot in a time-consuming way using a graphic programme in a kind of digital ”silhouette technique”. He limits himself to an elementary spectrum of colours and supplements the films with the original soundtrack or new sound material, which forms a contrast to the images. The tension-filled impact of his works arises from the disparity between the visual and auditory perception.

The animation film City of Nature was conceived in 2011 as a site-specific video installation for Madison Square Park in New York and reflects on the relationship between nature, humankind and film. The video is a collage comprising of 70 nature shots that have been drawn from 20 different feature films, including Brokeback Mountain, The Old Man and the Sea, Twin Peaks and Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog. The individual clips fit together to form an abstract narration while the dramatic film soundtracks lend the fragments an atmospheric density. This is contrasted with the abstract representation of landscapes that have similarities with the design of a computer game. The viewer follows an entire day from daybreak to moonrise. These moments merge to form a constantly recurring cycle. In his work Beatles Über California, Ezawa combines the film material from a Twist and Shout performance by the Beatles from 1964 with the sound of California Über Alles (California over Everything) by the Dead Kennedys. The recording of the Beatles performance in the Ed Sullivan Show has been edited, animated and set synchronously to music, so that the musicians appear to be performing to a playback of the Californian punk band. The dissonance between the popular-naive pictures and the aggressive sound lends the Beatles performance an ironic undertone.

The artist’s characteristic style reduces the physical and psychological expression of the protagonists to a minimum. As a result, the banality of the source material used by Ezawa is made a central theme, which has been deprived of its aura by excessive reproduction and visibility in the media. His video archaeology, produced by hand, reverses this development and at the same time questions the relationship between reality and reproduction.

Kota Ezawa was born in 1969 in Cologne and studied from 1990 to 1994 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the class of Nam June Paik. He then moved to the San Francisco Institute of Art and completed his MFA in 2003 at Stanford University. His works have been shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2005), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2006), the Whitney Biennal (2006) and the Hayward Gallery in London (2007), as well as the Columbus Art Museum in the USA (2011). He is represented by the Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt and the Haines Gallery in San Francisco. Kota Ezawa lives and works in Berlin and San Francisco.

The FELDBUSCHWIESNER gallery, formerly named KUNSTAGENTEN, has been successfully representing young contemporary artists since 2005. It is based in Linienstrasse, in the quarter of Berlin-Mitte, a neighbourhood full of prestigious public and private art galleries. The area is also heavily influenced by recent positive economic and social developments, offering the gallery an ideal platform for the mediation and representation of its artists.
The FELDBUSCHWIESNER gallery defines itself as a mediator for singular positions and artists who endeavour to follow very individual practices. We put priority on cooperation and discourse with our artists and collectors, without committing ourselves to any specific artistic practice, and therefore, our exhibitions do not follow predefined thematic guidelines.

FELDBUSCHWIESNER
Linienstrasse 155
D- 10115 Berlin
+49 30-69504142
galerie@feldbuschwiesner.de

Press Contact: Daniela Esposito
Mail: esposito@feldbuschwiesner.de
Phone: +49 30-69504142

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