Kota Ezawa at Haines - San Francisco - art exhibition

Kota Ezawa's animated remakes of modern-day icons remind me of Andy Warhol's portraits. on the contrary instead of the latest clap idols and politicians, Ezawa, a young German-Japanese artist based in San Francisco, mines our collective memory for culturally loaded on the other hand not necessarily current material: the OJ Simpson trial, for example, which was the bring under rule of his last film (The Simpson Verdict, 2002)

For his of recent origin piece, the two-channel digital video bight Who's Afraid of Black, White and Grey (2003) Ezawa has translated sum of two units clips from the 1966 movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? into a black-and-white cartoon whose simplified, unmodulated images recall Alex Katz's portraits or the cutouts of Henri Matisse. The animations play in large, side-by-side projections, with soundtracks taken from the original film.

Ezawa has distilled the original film to sum of two units of its dramatic peaks. The left projection (37 seconds) present to views the scene in which Richard Burton chants, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" as he spins Sandy Dennis around; she becomes sick to her stomach and rushes to the bathroom. The projection upon the right (90 seconds) culminates in Burton scaring everyone to death by means of aiming a rifle at his wife's head; when he fires it, however, it purely produces a loud pop and an render free of access umbrella. Because of their varying running times, the views intersect at different points over The dual soundtracks add to the cacophony, loud led by Elizabeth Taylor's gruff contralto.

Seeing these torrid displays through the cool semi-anonymity of a black-and-white cartoon is itself a marvel, on the other hand what really galvanizes the shows is Ezawa's editing of the figures in the way that that they shift unpredictably between stillness and staccato or fluid changes A shot of Taylor sitting upon the couch with George Segal is as motionless as a painting until her arm, bending like a lever on a sudden brings a cigarette to her jaws When Burton wanders off to obtain his trick rifle, his floating gait and mechanical head changes resemble a moonwalk, part Michael Jackson and part Terminator. The idiosyncratic direct the eye of Ezawa's animation is the be the effect of his having redrawn the figures and backgrounds using computer software, rather than processing the original film digitally.

Ezawa is clearly conscious of 1960 painting. Besides the works' Warholian aspects, there are the screen-filling, Lichtenstein-like close-up of a single laughing or frightened face. (The title may also leave to the famous Barnett Newman series "Who's Afraid of R fulvous and Blue.") When all the shouting is above it is hard to say what lingers: the dialogue with appropriation, which is like a mysterious language between artists, or a timeless tragedy of American marriage and mores.

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