Kota Ezawa
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Kota Ezawa borrows images from the news, art history, and pop culture and turns them into cartoon-like stories. He produces flat and two-dimensional imagery via his light-boxes, works on paper, and animations. These works are often inspired by important moments in history, such as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, the O.J. Simpson trial, and media coverage of former National Football League (NFL) player Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem as a symbol of protest. Ezawa’s animations, which he describes as “moving paintings,” make use of a labor-intensive technique that requires the artist to recreate each frame with close attention, producing hundreds of illustrations via digital drawing and animation software. He is best known for a signature style that embraces vibrant colors and simple forms, stripping detail from images to leave only essential attributes and environments. This reductive technique does not diminish the power of the image, as it turns to the familiar historical or cultural context to fill any gaps left by the artist’s erasures. However, the gesture also invites viewers to think about how these erasures might destabilize the reliability of public memories, highlighting the faulty process of collective remembering and what it tends to overlook.
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Kota Ezawa borrows images from the news, art history, and pop culture and turns them into cartoon-like stories. He produces flat and two-dimensional imagery via his light-boxes, works on paper, and animations. These works are often inspired by important moments in history, such as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, the O.J. Simpson trial, and media coverage of former National Football League (NFL) player Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem as a symbol of protest. Ezawa’s animations, which he describes as “moving paintings,” make use of a labor-intensive technique that requires the artist to recreate each frame with close attention, producing hundreds of illustrations via digital drawing and animation software. He is best known for a signature style that embraces vibrant colors and simple forms, stripping detail from images to leave only essential attributes and environments. This reductive technique does not diminish the power of the image, as it turns to the familiar historical or cultural context to fill any gaps left by the artist’s erasures. However, the gesture also invites viewers to think about how these erasures might destabilize the reliability of public memories, highlighting the faulty process of collective remembering and what it tends to overlook.