Courtesy of theThree screen video projection, continuous loop with three sound conesThree screen video projection, continuous loop with three sound conesTodd Johnson
Courtesy of theTodd Johnson
Courtesy of the artist, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA and Murray Guy, New York, NYSource: FinePix S3Pro
Courtesy of theThree screen video projection, continuous loop with three sound conesThree screen video projection, continuous loop with three sound conesTodd Johnson
Courtesy of theTodd Johnson
Courtesy of the artist, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA and Murray Guy, New York, NYSource: FinePix S3Pro
The History of Photography Remix (2005), a slide show of seminal pictures transformed by Ezawa’s signature style, is the source material for a number of projects included in the exhibition. Spanning more than a century of images culled from newspapers, magazines, and museum walls, the project explores the way that everything from science to journalism to fine art to television news uses photography to manufacture the hyper-real. The sequence includes an 1895 x-ray, a 1952 UFO sighting, a Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still from 1978, a 1996 media snapshot of JonBenet Ramsey, as well as many others. Remix’s appropriations engage photography in a critical discourse about its ability to (falsely) suggest the real.
This material has been translated into lightboxes and aquatint etchings that further develop the relationship between source and reality. Kota (2006), a print, presents an historic and ubiquitous use of photography: the self-portrait. The artist directly addresses the viewer with his black eyes, recalling the complex relationship between camera and sitter and challenging the photographer’s control over the frame, and thereby the slice of time.
The Simpson Verdict (2002) is a three-minute video animation of the highly broadcasted trial. Actual voices find Simpson innocent while the drawn footage re-codes the viewer’s distance to the material. The camera pans a faceless crowd and pauses on reflective expressions of the judge and Simpson, whose pupils shift heavily back and forth as he learns his fate. Ezawa’s revision humanizes the moment by removing the television-generated spectacle.
The three-channel animated projection Lennon Sontag Beuys (2004) suggests that the photographic’s power to imply reality, and the societal thirst for it, can be harnessed as an agent for positive change. Three artists/celebrities speak simultaneously about the possibility of images, using the camera’s attention to promote social awareness.
Kota Ezawa re-presents historical footage and photos to investigate photography’s unsettled relationship to its framing devices—to the lens, the viewer, art, and history.
-Kate Green
Curator of Education and Exhibitions
