Monitor/Watch

Distant Recall

Words: Ken Coupland

Video artist Kota Ezawa transforms iconic imagery derived from seminal moments in media history into mesmerizing, flies-in-amber renderings that nudge our collective memories. For Lennon-Sontag-Beuys, the artist borrows from documentary footage and audio tracks of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1967 “bed-in” for peace, along with clips of lectures delivered by media philosopher Susan Sontag and the later conceptualist Joseph Beuys. “I’m curious to see if, when I show these three distinct artistic personalities simultaneously, they culminate in something new that is all mine,” Ezawa states.

In previous works that re-imagined subjects as various as the O. J. Simpson trial and the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Ezawa has appropriated a cast of instantly recognizable cultural icons that return as characters in a skewed version of the real world. Based on minimal visual cues, his creations nevertheless manage to evince an eerie verisimilitude, undercut by blank expressions and stilted gestures that give them the appearance of sleepwalkers in some unsettling dream.

Ezawa relies on basic DIY editing tools – Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects – to craft strangely hypnotic 2-D, vector-based animations that hearken back to classic movie cartoons, yet resemble nothing so much as moving paper cut-outs. In the process he creates discrete loops – composed of hundreds, even thousands of individual frames – that are merely a few minutes in length. The cartoons’ flat surfaces and solid hues look deceptively simple, but much of their effect is derived from Ezawa’s evocative color palettes and the totemic quality of his drawing.

“I’m very ground level,” Ezawa explains. “But I don’t see myself as some simple-minded artist. At the same time, the technology I use is just there to connect the little dots I need to get where I’m going.” It’s a painstaking process that involves both the mechanical (in sheer volume of vector-based drawings he generates) and the intuitive. As for his method, “You have to internalize the moment,” he warns. “If you think about it you’ll mess up.”

Born in Germany to Japanese and German parents, the 35-year-old Ezawa can be excused for taking a distanced view of contemporary cultural crosscurrents – along with a reluctance to be pigeonholed. As an undergraduate in one of Germany’s first university video lab courses, he recalls hanging out with students in the painting department for inspiration. Nowadays his work, fittingly, is shown in art galleries and sold on DVD to collectors for sums in the low- to mid-four-figure range (so don’t expect to see it posted on the Web anytime soon). “I’m not trying to produce salable art or even art that’s for curators,” Ezawa notes. “I’m really trying to just keep it interesting and worthwhile for me, otherwise it’s a nightmare.”