Multiplex features two new animations by Kota Ezawa that draw from, respectively, the 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, and a YouTube video showing an infamous 2004 brawl at an NBA basketball game.  In both works, Ezawa replaces the camera’s mimetic gaze with a digitally animated screen that selectively filters information and details from the original source material. While pointedly different in tone, subject matter and narrative structure, both animations—and particularly the dialogic space created between them—ask us to consider our relationship to filmed images as they are continually framed, re-framed and circulated.

LYAM 3D is a silent digital animation of scenes from the seminal Resnais/Robbe-Grillet film, L’année dernière à Marienbad.  Viewed through anaglyph red-green glasses, Ezawa’s 3D animation circles around the film—which itself is almost hermetically circuitous—by focusing on shots in which the actors remain nearly motionless, fixed to their baroque surroundings like models in a diorama. Yet as the animations move across the screen, the characters appear to shift endlessly in space.  Ezawa disturbs our assumed proximity to the images, simultaneously flattening and deepening the film, distending and slowly warping its oblique topology.

Also set in a palace—the Palace of Auburn Hills, home of the Detroit Pistons—Brawl is a 16mm animated film of a fight at a Pistons-Pacers game that began with a foul and a cup of beer thrown from the stands and ended with the suspension of 9 NBA players. Accustomed to tracking the linear movement of the ball through the court, the televised video feed jerkily shifts and pans and zooms throughout the arena to show multiple points of conflict simultaneously unfolding. Ezawa describes the scene as reminiscent of a Rubens painting, for instance The Battle of the Amazons, 1598, where tension is dispersed across the surface. He layers multiple audio recordings into the film’s soundtrack, mixing the voices of the announcers with the sounds of players and audience coming from the stadium floor and catacombs.

This is Kota Ezawa’s second solo exhibition at Murray Guy.  Born in 1969 in Cologne, Germany, he studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, San Francisco Art Institute and Stanford University, and lives and works in San Francisco. He has had solo exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum; Hayward Gallery, London; ArtPace, San Antonio; Santa Monica Museum of Art; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford; and Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver. His work is on view through October 17 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium Since 1960, and will be on display in Ours: Democracy in the Age of Branding opening on October 16 at Parsons The New School for Design, New York. From November 1 – December 20, 2008 Brawl will be on view at the Luckman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles. 

Gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 10am – 6pm. For further information and images, please contact the gallery at 212-463-7372 or info@murrayguy.com.