Kota Ezawa, video artist

‘Two Stolen Honeymoons Are Better Than One’
Kota Ezawa, video artist
Video still, 2007

Kota Ezawa is a German-born US-based video artist of a unique kind. He re-records moments from media and history, and creates his own rendering in 2D video animation. After collecting photographs and video footage of specific events – such as President John F Kennedy’s assassination or the O J Simpson trial – on a computer, Ezawa traces the images frame-by-frame and uses flat colours to fill in details and provide highlights.

The effect is quite unique. According to Kate Green, Curator of Education and Exhibitions, Artpace, San Antonio: “Ezawa’s simplified versions of photographs, which are themselves already subjective takes on the real, paradoxically amplify emotive content and create a hyper-real.”

For instance, the image displayed in this post, Two Stolen Honeymoons Are Better Than One, a two-channel animation, is created from Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s infamous home video of their honeymoon. Ezawa re-drew each frame of the footage on his computer and coloured in specific details. The end-result is almost a Disney-like animation.

Kota Ezawa was born in Cologne, Germany in 1969 but is now based in San Francisco, USA. He received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from Stanford University.

Kota Ezawa’s bio can be found here and here, and samples of his work here and here.

[Citation: Artpace, Artkrush, Haines Gallery, Murray Guy gallery, California College of the Arts.]