For the past 15 years Kota Ezawa has transformed films, videos, photographs, and paintings into digital animations, light box installations, and outdoor sculptures. In this talk Ezawa will show examples from his ongoing body of work, including his animation of the OJ Simpson Verdict, the re-construction of 13 artworks stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and his most current project, a watercolor animation of football players kneeling during the national anthem. Along with his own work, Ezawa will present an introduction to the intersecting histories of animation and image sampling that inspired his practice.
Kota Ezawa’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at SITE Santa Fe (2017); Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2013); Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite (2012); and Hayward Gallery Project Space, London (2007). He participated in recent group exhibitions at Hamburger Kunsthalle (2018); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2017); Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain (2017); and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2016). Ezawa's work has earned a number of awards, including the SECA Art Award of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006), a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation (2010), and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award (2003).
His work is included in renowned collections such as: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Kunsthalle Bremen among others.
Ezawa lives and works in Oakland, California.
This artist talk is presented in collaboration with the UCSB Department of Art and College of Creative Studies Fall 2018 Visiting Artist Colloquium. The program offers a wide range of voices in dialogue, exploring the topics of contemporary art, theory, and cultural production by emerging and established visiting artists, as well as members of UCSB’s faculty and graduate students.
All lectures are free and open to the public, held on Thursday from 5 - 6:50 pm in UCSB’s Embarcadero Hall in Isla Vista. For directions, please visit the UCSB campus map.