Kota Ezawa transforms iconic imagery derived from seminal moments in media history into vector-based animations that hearken back to classic cartoons. The material for his video works, films, slide projections and lightboxes ranges from the televised footage of the reading of the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial (The Simpson Verdict, 2002) to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s on/off-screen marital strife (Who’s Afraid of Black, White and Grey, 2003).

For Lennon Sontag Beuys, the artist uses documentary footage of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 Amsterdam “bed-in” for peace, a 2001 lecture delivered by the late media philosopher Susan Sontag at Columbia University and Joseph Beuys’ 1974 lecture at the New School for Social Research in New York.

Kota Ezawa was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, San Francisco Art Institute and Stanford University. His work has been shown at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and New Langton Arts, San Francisco. He has participated in the traveling exhibition From Baja to Vancouver, the 2004 Shanghai Biennial, Seeing Double at the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh and I still believe in miracles at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France.