print edition

posted on 13/04/07
GOING OUT: VISUAL ART
Drawing from history
By DANIELLE EGAN

Leni Riefenstahl. A Polaroid camera. Machine-gun-toting Patty Hearst. The earth from space. A cowboy. An atomic bomb test. Chimps in space. Artist Kota Ezawa's handcrafted interpretations of these diverse media images, currently showing at Charles H. Scott Gallery, draw due attention to the bizarre topography that is the modern mind.

"I think the way we store memory is becoming more and more complicated," Ezawa says on the phone from his home in San Francisco. "We remember the past through mediated images, things from television and newspapers, not the actual events."

Take the O.J. Simpson trial verdict. Ezawa painstakingly rendered the media footage into a hand-drawn animated video, paring down the event into a simplified reading of hand gestures and facial features, effectively heightening the drama of that moment in history.

"O.J. smiled for a split second, but many people only remember that from watching my animation," Ezawa says about the 2002 piece that has been exhibited from Shanghai to Paris and was recently purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

"There's so much else going on in the real-life footage that it's hard to discover these moments. My stylistic method hides some aspects of the previous images and brings out other aspects."

Like a Warhol silkscreen or a South Park cartoon character (both of which he has been compared to stylistically), Ezawa cleans up his subjects, here displayed in paper cutouts, aquatint etchings and a three-panel video of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Susan Sontag and artist Joseph Beuys discussing art. Even a kidnapped prisoner of the German terrorist group RAF looks GQ fresh in contrast to the original ransom photo image.

But while many images are inspired by his own "intimate memories," neither pop idolatry nor deconstructive irony informs his process.

"I was influenced more by punk rock growing up and irony doesn't really exist where I come from," says the 37-year-old, who grew up in Germany and studied art at the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie before heading to the San Francisco Art Institute and later Stanford.

"People comment that my work is earnest and that might be the result of being from a very earnest society."

Being half-Japanese, Ezawa didn't feel "normal and at home" until he moved to San Francisco. "Now, I'm somewhere in between the foreigner and the insider," he says.

Given the way his art bridges the personal with the socio-political, perhaps recreating images through laborious hand drawing (his videos typically take six months to a year to finish) is an attempt to reclaim meaning and individuality from an increasingly airbrushed mediated culture?
"Of course I'm a little skeptical about where our world is headed, but I'm also an optimist and kind of a utopian," says Ezawa, who balances teaching at California College of the Arts and raising a seven-year-old daughter with art world demands around the globe. "I'm not just trying to show problems in our environment and our media, I'm trying to have a real dialogue with people."

Ezawa's first solo show in Canada stirs up all sorts of animated discussions and underlines how much we lean on media imagery to bond collectively and perhaps even plot a better route forward.

"It's important that we're open about history and don't repress it," says Ezawa, who remains humble about his rising popularity in the art world. "It's nice to hear praise and know there's a demand, but the thing I'm doing is very simple, nothing more than a baker or butcher or someone with a bicycle shop."