Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Video, drawing
Website: kotaezawa.com
Kota Ezawa was born in 1969 in Cologne, Germany, of Japanese and German heritage. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, then moved to California to receive a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995 and an MFA from Stanford University in 2003. He has lived and worked in Oakland since. His 2002 video The Simpson Verdict — a hand-redrawn, animated version of the O.J. Simpson verdict announcement — brought him widespread attention while he was still a graduate student and established the core approach of his practice.
Ezawa creates animated videos, lightboxes, works on paper, and slide projections by manually redrawing found images, film footage, and news events in a distinctive flattened, unmodulated style. By stripping complex visual information to its most essential elements, he forces viewers to look more slowly and carefully at scenes they think they already know. The result is work that is at once familiar and estranging — cartoon-like yet serious, concerned with how images mediate history, collective memory, and political reality. His practice has been described as a form of "video archaeology."
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