Kota Ezawa: The Curse of Dimensionality
In works produced during the last three years, Kota Ezawa addresses dimensionality and perception using a variety of media including animation, lightboxes, paper cutouts and stereoscopic images. Physical and illusionary space, reality and fiction form a complex relationship in Ezawa’s still and moving images that reference films, TV footage and photographs from the early twentieth century to present-day. The exhibition is divided into two areas, one containing light emitting works displayed as lightboxes and flat screen monitors — the other made up of light-absorbing surfaces such as framed works on paper and photographic prints. This is Ezawa’s fourth solo exhibition at Haines Gallery.
The exhibition includes City of Nature (2011), an animation originally commissioned for Madison Square Park in New York. The work weaves together fleeting excerpts from 20 popular films — including “Days of Heaven”, “Brokeback Mountain”, “Twin Peaks” and “Fitzcarraldo” — in which nature alone is featured onscreen. Drawn manually using Ezawa’s hallmark style of freehand, computer-assisted digital animation, these vignettes are edited together to form a new narrative in which nature, otherwise used as cut away or in-between shots, acts as the central character.
Nature and landscape are also featured in Ezawa’s new lightboxes, stereoscopic images and paper cutout collages. Referencing NASA imagery and nature photography the lightbox images are drawn in a way that de-naturalizes their photographic reality, lending them a fictional aesthetic. In the stereoscopic images, a process new to the artist’s practice, Ezawa re-presents scenes from City of Nature as virtual dioramas. When seen through a stereo viewer, the flatness that commonly characterizes Ezawa’s work expands into a layered three-dimensional space. Landscapes and seascapes are the subject of the cut paper collages. The paper cutouts mirror the flat color drawing style found in Ezawa’s digitally produced works. In the exhibition the cutouts are arranged to form another mega landscape made up of diverse individual paper landscapes.
Paper cutouts also form the basis for Paper Space — a pop-up book consisting of paper cutout dioramas based on film and TV depictions of historic events that have been the subject of earlier works by Ezawa. Apart from providing a gaze at history, the book contemplates space — the space of a book, the space of a page, the book as space, flatness, and three-dimensionality. Paper Space was produced through the San Francisco Center for the Book, where the work is concurrently on view from December 16, 2011 through January 27, 2012.
Two additional animated films are on view at Haines Gallery, Beatles Über California (2010) and LYAM 3D (2008). Beatles Über California pairs an animation of the Beatlesʼ 1964 performance on the Ed Sullivan show with the Dead Kennedysʼ song “California Über Alles,” treating sound and image as two distinct channels that address the viewer simultaneously. LYAM 3D is a silent animation in anaglyphic 3D based on Alain Resnais’ 1961 film “The Last Year at Marienbad.” The animation focuses on scenes from the film where actors hold statuesque poses in front of the gardens and interiors of a baroque luxury hotel. With the added effect of 3D animation, Resnais’ sets turn into architectural models inhabited by motionless characters.
